Only 5% Have Mapped Their Real Process

Jordan Fleming bootstrapped smrtPhone to just under 10 million dollars and nearly 60 people, then moved from CEO to chairman. His case: AI agents give you no leverage when you drop them into a process built around human limits and full of invisible work.

Jordan Fleming bootstrapped smrtPhone from Poland, with the technical team in Romania, to just under 10 million dollars and nearly 60 people. Along the way it went from a phone system built for Podio to what he now calls an agentic conversation platform. He has since moved from CEO to chairman.

His argument is that most companies spending on AI are not seeing growth from it. They drop very capable agents into processes designed around human limits, and those processes are full of invisible work that people quietly cover. Only about 5 percent of the companies he has worked with have mapped their processes the way the work actually runs.

That is the subject of his book, The AI Workforce: redesign the business, one process at a time, around work shared between agents and people.

In this episode

• Four owners, distinct roles, and disagree and commit when they can't agree
• Why they built in Eastern Europe, inside the EU legal and IP framework
• The happy accident of building a phone system for Podio, and growing with almost no marketing
• How every product update now flows into a company brain that updates help docs and agents
• An agent that made 220,000 calls in three and a half weeks
• Why AI spend is not turning into growth
• The invisible work that never makes it onto the process map
• Business structures built for one kind of labor, and what changes now
• Hiring a role based AI agent and onboarding it to your company
• Why voice agents built software first sound great in demos and fail in execution

Timestamps

1. 00:00Welcome
2. 01:01Four owners, and stepping up to chairman
3. 02:15Splitting the roles so nobody deadlocks
4. 03:43Why build the company in Eastern Europe
5. 05:18From a PhD in music to Poland
6. 06:08Bootstrapping a phone system for Podio
7. 08:09From VoIP company to agentic conversation platform
8. 08:45How AI changed the way they build
9. 09:40220,000 calls in three and a half weeks
10. 10:15Why AI spend is not turning into growth
11. 12:08Only 5 percent map their real process
12. 13:52Redesigning process after process
13. 14:42The AI Workforce, his book
14. 16:08The four zones of AI
15. 16:39Business structures built for one kind of labor
16. 18:47The next 24 months
17. 20:06What broke as they scaled
18. 22:05Hiring role based AI agents
19. 23:27Onboarding an agent: property maintenance
20. 25:01Latency, and why telecom first matters
21. 26:43Who smrtPhone is for
22. 28:14Where to find Jordan and the book

About Jordan Fleming

Jordan Fleming is the cofounder and chairman of smrtPhone, an agentic conversation platform for voice and text, built for companies of 10 to 500 users. He is the author of The AI Workforce, a framework for redesigning a business around shared execution between AI agents and people.

The AI Workforce, free executive briefing for listeners: thefutureworkforce.ai/p/os-show

smrtPhone smrtphone.io