START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”

START: Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian “Forward-deployed AI Agents”

From START by Fondo

July 8, 2026 · 10 min · Episode 141

About this episode

Bao Nguyen discusses how Hessian's AI agents automate business operations by integrating into existing workflows.

Bao's job was automating other people's jobs. So he automated his own. His team used to forward deploy the old way — go into customers' offices, sit next to their teams, watch how the work actually got done, then build the automations by hand. Then they asked the obvious question: why are humans doing all of this? Now Hessian's AI agents construct a digital twin of your business, map your back-office workflows, and take the work over end-to-end — plugging into whatever you already use. Slack. HubSpot. Salesforce. No new dashboard. No workflow migration. No figure-it-out-yourself AI tooling. The thesis behind it is blunt: the future of enterprise AI isn't selling more SaaS. Businesses want to adopt AI. They don't know how. Another tool doesn't solve that problem — it adds to it. So the companies that win won't sell software. They'll sell outcomes. 🎙️ Bao Nguyen, Co-Founder & CEO, Hessian on Fondo START pod 01:28 — Introducing Hessian's vision for forward deployed AI agents that automate business operations. 01:58 — Why conversations with customers revealed that AI adoption is still a major challenge for mid-market companies. 02:34 — How Hessian evolved from a workflow…

People in this episode

Host: Fondo

Guest: Bao Nguyen

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Hessian

Products: AI agents, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce

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