Laura Kornhauser co-founded Stratyfy 10 years ago to help community banks and credit unions make better risk decisions using machine learning.
Selling AI into financial institutions — one of the most change-resistant buying environments in B2B — meant building trust before anything else.
For the first several years, that was the entire job.
Then November 2022 happened.
ChatGPT went mainstream. Demand for AI exploded. For most founders, this was a gift.
For Stratyfy, it was a problem.
Overnight, every buyer conflated all AI with generative AI. Stratyfy had spent years building explainable, deterministic machine learning — a fundamentally different technology. But when AI came up in any sales conversation, buyers assumed gen AI, and gen AI terrified them.
The go-to-market had to change entirely.
They stopped explaining the product and started addressing the fear directly: what makes Stratyfy different from gen AI is exactly what makes it safe for high-stakes, regulated use cases.
The market's anxiety became the proof point.
Then, over the next 18 months, something else broke: cold outreach stopped working completely.
Not because their outreach was bad. Because AI-generated spam had so thoroughly saturated their buyers' inboxes — bank and credit union executives — that even well-crafted, human-written cold email no longer landed.
They went back to basics:
→ Warm introductions from trusted connections
→ In-person, relationship-first conversations
→ Content that helped buyers do their job — with no product pitch attached
That last one surprised them. Stratyfy published a third-party risk management guide for the AI era — a framework for evaluating any AI vendor, including Stratyfy. No pitch. No product tie.
Bank CEOs and boards started reaching out to ask for it.
The same buyers who were impossible to cold email were now coming inbound.
Meanwhile, Stratyfy spotted a second problem inside their customers: data.
Most financial institutions couldn't unlock AI value because their data wasn't ready. Not just for Stratyfy's product — for anyone's.
So they built a dedicated data preparation, cleaning, and ingestion product. Not because it was their core business, but because it was the on-ramp to everything else.
"The objective can't be 'use AI,'" Laura said. "You need to solve problems. Technology can solve those problems really well. But the goal has to be the problem, not the technology."
Ten years in, Stratyfy is now preparing for a world where their product needs to work without a UI at all — operating behind the scenes inside whatever chat interface their customers already use.
Listen to the full conversation with Laura Kornhauser on BUILDERS: https://lnkd.in/eGmnnFFH
