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About

We've spent our careers building businesses with technology

Now we're building a better way to do it.

Scott Riddell, co-founder of AI Creative
Scott RiddellCo-founder
Yvan Boisjoli, co-founder of AI Creative
Yvan BoisjoliCo-founder

Technology has always had the potential to transform a business. The problem is that getting from an idea to a useful piece of software has traditionally been slow, expensive and complicated.

AI is changing the economics of building software. Things that once required large teams, long timelines and significant budgets can increasingly be designed, tested and built much faster.

But faster development doesn't eliminate the need for experience. It makes knowing what to build even more important. That idea is at the heart of AI Creative.

Why we started

Why we started AI Creative

We didn't start this company because AI became popular. We started it because AI removed one of the biggest constraints we've dealt with throughout our careers: the distance between recognizing a business problem and being able to build the technology that solves it.

We have both spent years sitting on the other side of the table. We've been responsible for products, strategy, operations, growth, partnerships and technology businesses. We've seen good software create enormous leverage, and watched companies waste time and money implementing systems that never addressed the real problem.

Today, a small experienced team equipped with modern AI tools can accomplish things that previously required much larger development organizations. We think that creates an opportunity to build a different kind of technology company.

  • Smaller teams
  • Senior people
  • Faster iteration
  • Less overhead
  • More direct connection between the business problem and the people solving it
AI gives us leverage. Experience tells us where to apply it.

Our vision

Make powerful software practical for more businesses

For most of the history of business software, companies have faced an uncomfortable choice. Buy an off-the-shelf platform and change the business to fit the software. Or commission custom software and accept the cost, time and risk that traditionally came with it.

We believe that gap is getting much smaller. AI-assisted development, modern cloud infrastructure and increasingly capable platforms make it possible to create custom systems, integrations and automation far more efficiently than before.

Our goal is to help businesses take advantage of that shift. We're not attached to the technology. We're attached to the outcome.

Founders

Two different paths to the same conclusion

Scott Riddell

Scott Riddell

Product thinking first. Technology second.

Scott's career has largely been spent at the intersection of business problems and technology. As a product manager and business leader, his role has rarely been simply to come up with features. It has been to understand how a business works, identify where customers or teams are getting stuck, determine what should be built and bring the people required to make it happen together.

That work has taken him through ecommerce, tourism and activities technology, booking platforms, sales and marketing, operations, partnerships and business strategy, alongside entrepreneurial projects in areas including sports and health and wellness.

It created a particular way of looking at software: Start with the problem. Understand the workflow. Find the point of leverage. Then decide what technology belongs there.

Historically, turning those ideas into working products meant handing requirements to engineering teams and beginning a development process that could take months. AI has fundamentally changed that equation. Today Scott can combine years of product judgment with AI-assisted development to move much further into prototyping and building the solution itself, compressing the distance between understanding a problem and putting working software in front of the people who need it.

The technology is new. The product discipline behind it isn't.

Scott Riddell presenting a guest experience platform at an industry conference
Scott Riddell outdoors by the water
Yvan Boisjoli

Yvan Boisjoli

From building software to building a software company at scale.

Yvan's path started much closer to the code. In 2012, he co-founded Bold Commerce with Eric Boisjoli, Jason Myers and Stefan Maynard. What began with four founders grew into one of Manitoba's best-known technology companies.

Bold initially bootstrapped its growth before raising a $22 million CAD Series A in 2019 and a $35 million CAD Series B in 2021. By the time of that second financing, Bold was working with more than 90,000 brands across more than 170 countries and had grown to hundreds of employees.

Yvan served as CEO through that period of growth, helping take the business from an early Shopify app company into a much larger ecommerce technology organization. And that experience involved far more than software. It meant hiring and organizational design, product strategy, capital, partnerships, enterprise customers, scaling teams, making bets with incomplete information and learning which systems break as a business grows.

In 2022, Yvan moved out of the CEO role at Bold to focus on strategic partnerships and new entrepreneurial opportunities. He has since continued working with and advising technology businesses and founders. Most recently, he launched WorkSkedge, a software platform designed to bring scheduling, field operations, job costing and financial workflows together for trades businesses.

It's another version of a problem he has spent much of his career solving: Take a complicated business operation, understand how the pieces fit together, and build technology that makes the entire system work better.

Yvan Boisjoli speaking on a founder panel in Winnipeg
Yvan Boisjoli during his time leading Bold Commerce

Why it works

Why these two backgrounds fit together

One of us came primarily through product, commercial strategy and operations. The other built and scaled a software company from the ground up. We see the same opportunity from different directions.

Businesses don't need more software simply because software has become easier to build. They need people who can determine where technology will create leverage, what the right solution looks like, and how to implement it without creating another layer of complexity.

That's the company we're building.

What we combine

  • Product thinking
  • Business strategy
  • Software experience
  • AI-native development

What we want for clients

We want the opposite of dependence on complicated technology

Fewer manual processes

Work that requires repetitive copying, checking, sorting, routing or reporting should increasingly happen automatically.

Better information

People making important decisions should have the right information available when they need it, not buried across spreadsheets, inboxes and disconnected systems.

Software that fits the operation

Your business shouldn't have to contort itself around arbitrary software limitations when a better workflow can be designed.

Technology that earns its keep

Every project should have a reason to exist: save meaningful time, reduce cost, increase capacity, improve customer experience, reduce risk or create revenue.

More capable teams

The best technology doesn't replace the knowledge inside a company. It amplifies it.

Our job is not simply to deliver software. It's to leave the business operating better than we found it.

How we work

The principles we build by

  • Business problem before technology

    AI is a tool, not a strategy. We start by understanding the operation, the people involved and the economic consequence of the problem before deciding what should be built.

  • Build the smallest thing that creates meaningful leverage

    More features don't automatically create more value. We would rather solve one important problem extremely well, prove the value and expand from there.

  • Senior people stay close to the work

    We don't believe clients should buy the expertise of senior people and then spend the project working through layers of account management.

  • Use AI aggressively. Use judgment more aggressively

    We use AI to research, prototype, develop, analyze, automate and accelerate our work. But speed isn't the same thing as quality.

  • Measure the result, not the amount of software

    A complicated system isn't automatically more valuable than a simple one. If a small workflow saves hundreds of hours a year, it may be more valuable than a much larger application.

  • Tell clients when they shouldn't build something

    Not every problem needs custom software. Sometimes the right answer already exists. Sometimes the economics simply don't make sense. We would rather say that early.

  • Build for what happens after launch

    Software is rarely finished when it goes live. We design systems with that reality in mind and prefer long-term relationships where we can continue improving what we've built together.

What we bring

The experience we bring with us

We're a new company. We aren't going to pretend that means we have decades of agency history or manufacture a wall of case studies that don't exist. But this company wasn't started from zero.

  • Building and scaling software companies

    From four founders in a basement to an ecommerce technology company serving tens of thousands of brands around the world.

  • Product and operational leadership

    Years spent translating messy business problems into products, workflows and technology decisions.

  • Enterprise software and ecommerce

    Experience with the commercial, technical and organizational realities behind platforms businesses depend on every day.

  • Entrepreneurship

    Starting things, making bets, working with limited resources and learning what survives contact with real customers.

  • AI-native product development

    Using a new generation of tools to dramatically shorten the path from identifying an opportunity to testing and deploying a working solution.

These experiences aren't trophies. They're the lessons we're bringing into every project.

What we're building

The company businesses call when they know something should work better

We want AI Creative to become the company businesses call when they know something in their operation should work better, but aren't yet sure what the technology solution should be.

Not an outsourced development factory. Not an AI consultancy producing strategy decks. Not a company looking for somewhere to force the latest technology.

A team of experienced builders and operators who can understand the business, identify the opportunity and then actually build what comes next.

Better systems

Better systems. Better operations. Better businesses.

That's the work we're here to do.

Have a problem worth solving?

You don't need a specification document. You don't even need to know whether the answer is AI, automation or custom software. Bring us the problem. We'll help figure out what should come next.