</ Delali Dzirasa /> fearless founder and CEO > Organizing Principles---< baltimore >

For digital-services firm Fearless, a reliance on technology is innate. It became a necessity, however, as projects—like the website builds for the state of New Jersey and Florida’s Pinellas County school system— grew in complexity. The company, with more than 250 employees, sought to make project management and internal communication more efficient.

Enter artificial intelligence. Fearless uses tools like Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, and, most recently, Zoom’s built-in services to transcribe meetings. It then feeds those transcripts into large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude using custom-built platforms that ensure sensitive information can’t be accessed by outsiders. The goal is to extract sentiment from a dozen or more stakeholders on a call, organize their feedback into note form, and create recaps of the conversations. The effect has been powerful, according to Fearless co-founder and CEO Delali Dzirasa, 43. “We’ve found that it streamlines our processes and reduces errors,” he says. “It also helps us make betterinformed decisions when designing our products.”

That extends to the company’s back-end development. Tech chief Ravi Gourineni and his team are developing guidelines on when and how coders should use AI tools for engineers, such as GitHub Copilot. For now, the company is erring on the side of caution and telling coders to check any suggestions from AI—line by line. “We’re enthusiastic about AI,” says Dzirasa, “but we also take a balanced approach.”

Engineers have found another use for AI, though. They often turn to ChatGPT and Beautiful.ai to help write internal guidance or presentations. “Sometimes we might know what we want to say, but we don’t know how to articulate it,” says Gourineni. “It’s helping those people immensely.”