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With Gratitude

Where Humans + AI Take Us Next

Episode 3: More Outside Cats

Join us on August 25 at 3pm EDT as Mark Orttung, CEO of Projectworks, sits down with Stephanie Hogen and Allen Debes to talk about the work we all quietly hate, and what happens when bespoke AI agents finally take it off our plates.

Every consulting firm has two kinds of cats. House cats stay inside and handle the admin: the time cards, the expense reports, the month-end close. Outdoor cats are out with clients, doing the sharp work they actually signed up for. For a long time the ratio was fixed, because someone had to do the inside work. Mark’s argument is that AI agents are changing that math. Hand the drudgery to an agent and you don’t just save a few minutes. You free more of your people to be outdoor cats, and you give everyone a little more control over how they spend their day.

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Projectworks CEO Mark Orttung has spent his career growing professional services firms without breaking the people inside them. He started at Accenture, held product leadership roles at Genesys, GetThere, and Rearden Commerce, and as COO and President at Bill.com helped build the B2B payments platform that now moves more than 1% of US GDP. As CEO of Nexient, he grew the firm from around 200 people to more than 1,100, and revenue from $34M to over $130M, onshore and with no layoffs, before its 2021 sale to NTT DATA. Today he leads Projectworks, the software that helps consulting firms grow faster by taking the admin work nobody wants off their teams’ plates.

Allen Debes serves as a member of the Executive Leadership Team at Vervint and is the CEO of Koniag Capital

Koniag Capital CEO Allen Debes combines deep IT consulting leadership with a strong record of growing technology services businesses and driving expansion with a focus on building deep human relationships.

Vervint Chief Consulting Officer (CCO) Stephanie Hogen brings over 20 years of experience in technology consulting, leading growth initiatives across global organizations, specialized in creating user-centric solutions that deliver lasting impact.

If the work nobody wants just did itself, how many more of your people could be out doing the work that actually matters?

Topics We’ll Explore:

  • Why the admin work we hate most, from time cards to the month-end close, is exactly what AI agents should be doing
  • The outdoor-cats shift, and what changes inside a firm when the admin layer mostly runs itself
  • The difference between a nice moment of delight and structural time you actually get to keep
  • How better operations quietly turn into a growth engine, and why a growing firm makes almost every other problem easier
  • Where Projectworks is putting AI agents to work today, from your calendar to your time cards to your resource plan

You’ll hear Mark’s take on why growth fixes almost everything, real examples from inside consulting firms, and an honest look at where AI agents genuinely help and where the human still has to show up. Bring your questions. This one’s live.