AI Skunkworks
An agent is going to do your customer’s job.
Get on the right side of AI disruption. Partner with thrv to launch a skunkworks. Use thrvAI to build an agentic platform that gets your customer’s job done faster and more accurately than competitors.
An agentic product is a different business. It needs a different team.
New product, new platform, new pricing.
Your software organizes the inputs to a job and the customer still executes it. An agent does the job — so it gets priced against a labor line instead of a seat count, sold on speed and accuracy instead of features, and shipped daily against evals instead of quarterly against a roadmap.
Your existing product still has to get better.
It funds everything. The moment the team that holds your renewals turns to the new product, the integrations and reliability work your largest accounts are waiting on stop moving, and churn climbs. Divert that team and you lose the fuel for the new platform before it can run.
You’re a venture investor now. You need more than one bet.
Most bets fail. One bet is putting AI into your existing product — low risk, defends the renewal, won’t move your multiple. The other is a skunkworks building agents that get the whole job done. You need both, run by different people, judged on different numbers.
Clay Christensen studied the incumbents that survived disruption. “What they built were skunkworks: autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”
Clay Christensen
The engagement
How The Skunkworks Works
Step 01
We identify the market opportunity and build v1 for you
We define the customer’s job, identify the target customer segment, and build the first working version of the new agentic product on thrvAI — to mitigate risk before you commit anything.
Step 02
You stand up your skunkworks team
To start, you provide one engineer, one product manager, and one domain expert as full-time employees on the skunkworks team working with us using our thrvAI platform to rapidly build the new product with our JTBD experts.
Step 03
Validate the customer value and product-market fit
Together, our JTBD experts and your skunkworks team conduct customer interviews that thrvAI uses to determine the product roadmap improvements, validate the customer value proposition and confirm the product-market fit.
Step 04
Go to market and scale to create equity value
Once the first customers have validated the product-market fit, you add a go-to-market team to the skunkworks, scale the product, and accelerate the growth of the new business to create equity value.
The platform
thrvAI
Our AI platform for equity value creation through new product innovation. It puts the customer’s Job-to-be-Done at the center of every decision, and it runs continuously rather than only at planning time.
Proprietary AI reasoning analyzes the roadmap and go-to-market strategy, continuously calculating equity value creation and what to optimize across product, marketing and sales.
Identifies unmet customer needs and competitor weaknesses from the customer’s job, and defines the product strategy that will grow.
Builds new products and improvements more likely to satisfy customer needs better than competitors, and estimates ROI from customer assessments of how much faster and more accurately each innovation gets the job done.
Writes marketing stories and sales scripts from the customer’s struggle to get the job done, turning selling into helping customers buy.
Skunkworks is a new business
Running an Agentic Business
Your business today
- Roadmap commitments and sprint planning
- Feature specs and acceptance criteria
- QA against expected behavior
- Release train and architecture review
- Seat-based pricing and renewal management
- Story points and feature delivery
- Support tickets as the feedback loop
An agentic business
- Agents built per job step category — Plan, Execute, Assess, Revise, Conclude — with an orchestrator holding job state
- A harness per job step: context assembly, tool access, enforced output contracts, explicit failure and escalation behavior
- An eval suite and process to continuously improve AI accuracy using your team’s expertise
- Trace and span error analysis: failed runs read and labeled, a maintained failure taxonomy, first-failing-span distribution
- An MCP tool surface so the product works on other vendors’ systems of record, not only yours
- Models trained per job step on your own executions and expert preferences
- Outcome or consumption pricing, with cost per job execution managed as a gross margin line
Tell us your customer. We’ll show you the market opportunity.
Schedule a working session with our leadership team. By the time you leave the conversation, we’ll have walked you through the unmet customer needs in one of your core markets — using thrvAI, live.