By Mary Beth Roach
Entrepreneur Jeff Knauss has launched Arcovo AI, a new business that helps customers integrate AI into their companies.
Jeff Knauss and his business partner, Jake Tanner, launched Arcovo AI in January and with it, they’re launching their new clients into the future.
As Knauss explained, he and his team build AI-powered digital employees that a company can use to handle various office duties. Each “employee” is custom designed for their customers.
The Arcovo AI group meets with prospective clients — what Knauss called the “discovery process,” learning what they need and how the digital employee can work with the company’s software and workflows.
Knauss is very familiar with the pushback that such AI applications are getting — that they are taking jobs from humans.
However, he noted that if business owners don’t adapt to this technology, their competitors will.
“What does that mean? They have more overhead; they have more payroll. They have all these costs that maybe their competitors don’t,” he explained. “Every company will need AI integrated into their business or they simply won’t survive over the next five years, I’d say.”
With digital employees, he said, a company’s human team can focus on “what humans uniquely do best — build relationships with their clients; focus on customer support, make final decisions, strategic high-level thinking, creative thinking. So, we build these digital employees not as a replacement but as a tool to help your employees to do more high-level work and also to be able to grow in scale without adding more humans.”
Arcovo AI is the latest of several businesses that Knauss has founded. The name, he explained, is about navigating something new. It combines the word arc, which signifies moving and ovo, being a variation of novo or new.
He joined up with Tanner in 2014 to form Digital Hyve, a digital marketing and social media advertising. By the time they sold the business in 2021, they had 56 employees, offices in Syracuse and Rochester, clients from all over the country and an eight-figure revenue.
Tanner went on to different projects and Knauss has partnered with well-known businessman Adam Weitsman on six different ventures.
But then, prompted by the advent of ChatGPT in November of 2022, Knauss said he realized that AI was “going to change everything.” ChatGPT is described as an AI chatbot that is prompted by users to respond to questions in a human-like manner.
Always interested in technology, Knauss said, “I became obsessed with learning about AI and its applications and how it was not only going to change work but our lives.”
He approached Tanner, who had been working on other endeavors independently and they decided to start up another company, one in which, as Knauss explained, “focused on helping the small-to medium-sized business community integrate AI into their companies.”
In the five months since its launch, Arcovo AI, which is based in the INSPYRE Innovation Hub in downtown Syracuse, has seven full-time employees and 30 AI agents. Knauss projects the company will have 85 to 100 customers by the end of the year from across the country.
Although Knauss has been called a serial entrepreneur, he said he had no entrepreneurial mentoring growing up in the Phelps-Clifton Springs area. He graduated from SUNY Oswego in 2007 and ended up going into TV sales, which he said set him on his path toward entrepreneurship.
“I’ve always looked at business development as building genuine relationships and providing value to others, which is what gets me so excited about having a great service or product behind me to share with others,” he said.
And what he’s sharing is the future.
“I think AI will fundamentally change the future more than anything that ever happened,” he said.
