CEO MONTHLY / JANUARY 2025 12 Audr: Agentic AI Helping SMEs and their Leaders to Scale and Perform Better hen SMEs work, they work really well. With a shared sense of purpose and small teams, these businesses can be some of the most fun environments to work in anywhere in the world. However, the flip side is that when they do not work, whatever the reason may be, they can be some of the worst places in the world to work. Statistics unfortunately favour the latter, with many small business destined to fail, resulting in hardship for the entrepreneur, investors, staff, and their families. Thanks to Audr, much of this suffering is avoidable. Audr – which is both short for augmented leader and an old Nordic word for wealth and abundance – helps SMEs to avoid the fate of so many others by leveraging the unique combination of agentic AI and a CEO community, increasing both human flourishing and the chances of a business finding lasting success. Doubling down on the positive elements it finds and effectively weeding out the bad ones, Audr is the tool that CEOs have long been missing, delivering a package that is both straightforward and beneficial. More than a tool, Audr is, as touched on above, a community. Across the UK, the company works directly with CEOs, organising dinners in some of the best restaurants in London and other major cities before inviting approximately a dozen CEOs, bringing them together to talk about the challenges of leading and how its AI-based leadership services can help. Nov24369 Leadership has always been tough, but with the modern business landscape changing at a faster rate than ever before, it is only getting more difficult. From remote teams to an endless string of innovations, navigating this dynamic field often requires a helping hand. Enter Audr Limited, a company on a mission to optimise the art of human flourishing, something it does by empowering the CEOs and leaders of small- and medium-sized businesses alike, allowing them to become augmented leaders fit for our new, AI world. Having recognised its CEO, Cian Duggan, as the SME Artificial Intelligence CEO of the Year 2024 – London, we take a deep dive into the firm. W Established by super founders (according to Ali Tamaseb’s book Super Founders: What Data Reveals About BillionDollar Startups) for super founders, Audr is distinguished by its three expert founders, with aforementioned CEO Cian Duggan joined at the top by CPO Howard Kitto and CIO Adam Harrington. All three of these talented individuals have started, grown, and sold at least one business to the tune of more than $10 million, and an ongoing investment round is set to see another 10 to 15 super founders enter the fold. Cian is at the heart of the firm’s quality leadership, and when it comes to his responsibilities as CEO, he strictly adheres to the three core roles NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang believes every CEO should follow – setting the direction and goals of the business, building great teams, and not running out of cash. With this mindset to boot, Cian has been responsible for starting and scaling a number of businesses over the course of his career, including a recent enterprise he grew to 200 people before selling it to Accenture in 2022. Initially starting out as an engineer, Cian has been a serial entrepreneur now for more than three decades. Across this journey, as Cian himself puts it, “I’ve had some spectacular failures as well as some great successes, and what has got me to where I am today is a mixture of good luck and help from the good people around me – in particular my family, co-founders, and the investors in my businesses over the years – as well as an insatiable desire to understand new technologies and processes.” This final point in particular has proven crucial for Audr, which has built its philosophy around the unique grouping of agentic AI technology and encompassing support from a community of like-minded CEOs, all underpinned by a venture capital arm designed to deliver funding to clients. These three areas have been meticulously decided by Cian and the leadership team on the back of the former’s overarching business philosophy, which is to always check that the product being sold is an excellent fit for the current market.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTY1MjM3