Karla Congson didn’t spend her life dreaming of building her own company. For 25 years, she did what high-performing executives do. She nurtured her career inside large, complex organizations where she climbed and led.

Congson managed large teams, budgets and systems as CMO at Invesco and then at Dundee Corporation. She oversaw the agencies serving Ford Motor Company, learning how enterprises really work – and where they don’t.

“At no point did I ever aspire to become an entrepreneur,” the Founder and CEO of Agentiiv, an intelligent workspace powered by AI agents, tells The CEO Magazine.

“I spent a couple of decades managing teams, learning about systems, people and workflows in fairly large and complex organizations, but I’ve always considered myself a builder.

“Whether it was a new job, a promotion or a new industry that I went after, I went where I could effect change and make a real impact on people.”

Building her dream

Eventually, that instinct pulled her out of the corner office and into something far less structured. Ten years ago, Congson stepped away from corporate life and into the deep end of entrepreneurship. She was determined to build something on her terms.

“I decided that I needed to pursue my dream,” she reveals.

What she quickly discovered was that corporate success didn’t prepare her for the absence of guardrails that came with going out on her own.

“In the corporate world, there are rules, workflows, systems and five-year strategic plans,” Congson points out. “As an entrepreneur, everything is up to you.”

Without an inherited road map or defined growth path, she had the freedom to build from scratch – a prospect that was as thrilling as it was intimidating.

“I had to declare my own vision and figure out how to get to that vision,” she recalls.

Naturally, the shift was a bit disorienting, but Congson successfully launched a boutique consultancy that scaled into a multimillion-dollar business with more than 200 consultants serving clients across Canada. And best of all, her decades of experience meant she already had credibility and a network to tap into.

“I was pretty lucky that I decided to make the switch later in my career,” she says. “I had spent a couple of decades building up muscle memory, so when I went out on my own, I finally began building instead of babysitting.”

AI’s potential

When generative AI went mainstream in 2023, many leaders treated it like a curiosity. It became a clever writing assistant, a novelty and a fun, new toy to experiment with on the side. Congson, however, saw something more. She was immediately attracted to AI’s velocity.

“The gap between idea and impact suddenly looked like it was truncated by a hundred times,” she says.

Intrigued by the transformational potential enabled by ChatGPT, Congson started digging into prompting communities, early agent frameworks and experimental autonomous systems before most executives were comfortable using AI for email drafts.

“I saw massive potential very early on,” she explains.

From her vantage point and having run large, regulated enterprises, Congson understood they were rarely limited by ideas. It was always capacity that slowed them down.

“You are never satisfied with the capacity you have,” she says. “You are always leaving opportunity on the table.”

Her question wasn’t how to automate jobs but instead: “Could we use AI to scale time for small companies, mid-market companies and large companies?”

And that question became Agentiiv.

Scaling superpowers

Congson dismisses simple narratives about AI replacing workers. In her view, most organizations have a different problem entirely.

“Anywhere from 30–60 percent of our work isn’t actually operating at our highest values,” she insists. “There’s noise, there’s administration, there’s process and there’s bureaucracy.

“We wanted to see if we could use AI to take away the noise and then amplify an individual’s ability to operate at the best version of themselves.

“These questions led to the launch of a platform that quickly took the industry by storm. Agentiiv now powers teams in regional and global enterprises.”

She talks about AI agents as if they’re teammates, not tools. To Congson, they’re intelligent assistants that expand what humans can do rather than substitute for them. It connects back to something she prioritized when she built her first consultancy: joy.

“I’ve always wanted to inject joy back into work,” she says. “Oftentimes in corporate, joyful isn’t the way most people would describe their jobs.”

Used well, she believes that AI can give people back the work they actually enjoy.

“It can allow employees to rediscover the part of work that they love doing and focus 80 percent of their effort on that,” she adds.

Where AI goes wrong

If the potential is that significant, it begs the question: why are so many AI initiatives underwhelming?

“AI is a seductive opportunity,” Congson says plainly.

Organizations will chase productivity gains, headlines or the next model release, but they’ll tend to skip the hard part.

“You have to think about transformation and potentially transforming your business,” she says. “And where you start is by looking at the problem you’re trying to solve – not the tools you’re trying to implement.”

According to Congson, the companies seeing real results start with workflows. They involve the people closest to the friction points and redesign processes before inserting technology into the mix.

“It’s about starting with the problem first with the people who are solving those problems in the organization, transforming the workflows that will be unlocked to solve these problems and then layering in AI into those transformed workflows,” Congson explains.

The companies that win are also effective at leading.

“You need to bring your people on board – you need to lead them with a vision and you need to lead them with a clear role for the value they bring into this AI-augmented world,” she says.

Responsible AI

Indeed, speed is attractive. Governance, a little less so. But Congson insists the two cannot be separate.

“AI is moving very fast,” she says. “It’s tempting to move very fast without guardrails to keep up.”

She offers a simple metaphor.

“The best race car drivers out there are actually the ones with the best brakes and they know how to use them,” she explains.

Congson argues that organizations must go slow in order to go fast. That means clear governance structures, cybersecurity protocols, data privacy protection and infrastructure safeguards before scaling deployment.

“The critical things to think about are cybersecurity, data security, privacy risk and the security of your infrastructure,” she cautions.

For Congson, responsible AI at scale rests on three pillars: driving real ROI beyond experimentation, building enterprise-grade security from day one and embedding what she calls “radical employee-centricity”.

“Radical employee centricity needs to be part of that change,” she insists. “If we think about what Agentiiv is about, it’s about responsible AI at scale.”

There’s still time

Despite the pace of change, Congson doesn’t believe companies are too late.

“We’re still in the early innings of this ball game,” she says. “There is a huge delta between the speed of change of innovation and technology, so don’t be a spectator.

“You need to get your hands dirty, build and build with a view to scaling within your organization.”

But contrary to what most leaders might think, it doesn’t start with buying software.

“The first step is defining your vision for AI in your organization, the problems you want to solve for and the transformation you want to create,” she confirms.

Then it’s time to build. Every day, that’s what she says she’s doing, even as the technology landscape transforms constantly – she describes it as “building on shifting sand.” But Congson says that’s what energizes her.

“We are co-creating a new future of work with our clients, with these models and with this technology. Every day we are inventing something new,” she concludes.

“The future belongs not to those with the best models or tools, but to those who best integrate Al into the messy reality of human work.”