Co-Created Launches AI-Powered Intelligence Platform to Assess Business Growth Opportunities
Today, we’re announcing the launch of Sense, an AI-powered market intelligence platform to help strategy, product, innovation, and growth teams answer complex questions, identify market shifts, and drive executive-level decision-making—faster than ever.
Sense was initially developed by Co-Created to supercharge our venture building teams and reduce the time, investment, and resources needed to validate growth opportunities and bring new scalable solutions to market.
Unlike traditional research tools, Sense combines public, premium, and private data—everything from press releases and financial filings to social media posts and online video reviews to internal research reports, transcripts, and team notes. Sense gives users control over which data sources to use (and trust) and structures all this information to surface key patterns, detect shifts, and frame decisions based on an organization’s strategy and real-world goals. Leveraging 15 years of venture-building expertise, Sense's reasoning engine and analytical workflows deliver smarter decisions faster.
Every insight is supported with clickable sources for full transparency—not just summaries, but structured, defensible analysis designed for executive use. Final outputs and reports are customizable, on-brand, shareable slides, memos, or reports.
How It Works & Why Sense is Different
Data Sources Appropriate for Big Strategic Questions: Maintain control and choice over the data sources included in the analysis to ensure you get high-quality, trusted and traceable insights. Easily add or remove data sources to enrich findings, and combine disparate unstructured inputs to inform more comprehensive perspectives.
Differentiated Insights You Can Prove: Use AI to synthesize massive amounts of data and detect meaningful trends, surface anomalies, and highlight the most relevant insights tailored to specific strategic objectives. Sense provides full transparency and auditability throughout the process to preserve root sources and evidence (i.e. rather than a black box, Sense offers a “glass box” your compliance teams will appreciate – double-click anywhere along the process to investigate citations and go deeper).
Decision-Ready Outputs, Built for the Boardroom: Receive structured, formatted outputs that distill complex findings into clear, actionable intelligence for leadership teams. Sense creates customizable, shareable branded outputs in the layouts and filetypes most useful and digestible to your team (i.e. no need to copy and paste text outputs into separate presentations).
Rich Wilding, Partner at Co-Created, shared, “AI-powered tools are rapidly becoming embedded in the day-to-day operations of corporate teams. But adoption often remains fragmented— many organizations use AI to automate small, discrete tasks rather than to transform how they think and act at a strategic level. Sense is built to bridge that gap. Instead of focusing only on efficiency gains, it’s designed to expand the way teams approach strategy, investment, and growth. It doesn’t just automate research; it accelerates understanding, reduces blind spots, and ensures that leaders are seeing the full landscape—not just the part that’s most visible.”
Sense is now available to select partners and teams. Learn more or request early access at sense@co-created.com.
The best way to predict the future is to sense it and respond before anyone else does.
Co-Created Launches AI-Powered Intelligence Platform to Assess Business Growth Opportunities
Today, we’re announcing the launch of Sense, an AI-powered market intelligence platform to help strategy, product, innovation, and growth teams answer complex questions, identify market shifts, and drive executive-level decision-making—faster than ever.
Sense was initially developed by Co-Created to supercharge our venture building teams and reduce the time, investment, and resources needed to validate growth opportunities and bring new scalable solutions to market.
Unlike traditional research tools, Sense combines public, premium, and private data—everything from press releases and financial filings to social media posts and online video reviews to internal research reports, transcripts, and team notes. Sense gives users control over which data sources to use (and trust) and structures all this information to surface key patterns, detect shifts, and frame decisions based on an organization’s strategy and real-world goals. Leveraging 15 years of venture-building expertise, Sense's reasoning engine and analytical workflows deliver smarter decisions faster.
Every insight is supported with clickable sources for full transparency—not just summaries, but structured, defensible analysis designed for executive use. Final outputs and reports are customizable, on-brand, shareable slides, memos, or reports.
How It Works & Why Sense is Different
Data Sources Appropriate for Big Strategic Questions: Maintain control and choice over the data sources included in the analysis to ensure you get high-quality, trusted and traceable insights. Easily add or remove data sources to enrich findings, and combine disparate unstructured inputs to inform more comprehensive perspectives.
Differentiated Insights You Can Prove: Use AI to synthesize massive amounts of data and detect meaningful trends, surface anomalies, and highlight the most relevant insights tailored to specific strategic objectives. Sense provides full transparency and auditability throughout the process to preserve root sources and evidence (i.e. rather than a black box, Sense offers a “glass box” your compliance teams will appreciate – double-click anywhere along the process to investigate citations and go deeper).
Decision-Ready Outputs, Built for the Boardroom: Receive structured, formatted outputs that distill complex findings into clear, actionable intelligence for leadership teams. Sense creates customizable, shareable branded outputs in the layouts and filetypes most useful and digestible to your team (i.e. no need to copy and paste text outputs into separate presentations).
Rich Wilding, Partner at Co-Created, shared, “AI-powered tools are rapidly becoming embedded in the day-to-day operations of corporate teams. But adoption often remains fragmented— many organizations use AI to automate small, discrete tasks rather than to transform how they think and act at a strategic level. Sense is built to bridge that gap. Instead of focusing only on efficiency gains, it’s designed to expand the way teams approach strategy, investment, and growth. It doesn’t just automate research; it accelerates understanding, reduces blind spots, and ensures that leaders are seeing the full landscape—not just the part that’s most visible.”
Sense is now available to select partners and teams. Learn more or request early access at sense@co-created.com.
The best way to predict the future is to sense it and respond before anyone else does.
What if I told you that Primary Banking, as we know it, was dead?
Since the old days, the “gold standard” for growing a consumer banking businesses has been relationship banking.
Become the one institution a household primarily relies on. Win outsized share of wallet. Easy to understand. High ROI if you got it right. Primacy for the win.
The playbook was simple:
1. Deliver decent onboarding: Make it easy to walk into a bank and open a primary checking or savings account. Incentivize connecting that account to payroll, and get direct deposits every two weeks.
2. Create consistency: Provide seamless coverage across products with a skilled account manager and a good CRM (customer relationship management system). Cross-sell into higher margin products and services like credit cards and wealth management.
3. Remain relevant: As customers approach major milestones (Getting your first car? Buying a house? Saving for college?) put relevant offers and rewards in their path and cross-sell into a multi-line relationship.
Done right over time, you’ve increased loyalty, earned sticky deposits that provided a low-cost source of capital to grow a lending business, and transitioned a single account holder into primary banking relationship.
But, a few things have changed that are making it harder to predictably win “primacy.” Perhaps even more concerning for institutions, is the possibility that idea of primacy itself may be gone for good.
So what’s changed/changing?
Competition and fragmentation of deposits
A near-zero interest rate environment and explosive FinTech innovation created an unprecedented level of competitive pressure on every part of banking over the past 15 years. Almost overnight, consumers could send money faster, borrow more cheaply and — even with small balances — be offered superior interest rates just for opening up new deposit accounts. Ultimately, while most consumers did not move all of their money to challenger banks and digital wallets, a shift in willingness to have multiple relationships did occur. From new banks, to payment apps, to embedded finance players, consumers suddenly had lots of new places to stash deposits.
More informed consumers with real needs
I recently wrote about the rise of the “bionic consumer” in the context of the shifting power dynamic between providers of commodity services and their customers. One big takeaway was that it’s now easier than ever for customers to understand and optimize all of their purchasing decisions:
Do I have the right financial products (rate, reward, cost, service, values, etc) given what my needs are today?
The even bigger takeaway is that consumers will be able to passively optimize their financial lives; their AI money “agents” will hunt, compare, and analyze choices and changes in the market for them 24/7 across a huge set of factors and dimensions.
Better informed customers navigating a challenging economy will mean more demands on every provider and a greater portion of deposits up for grabs.
Open banking and money servers
As US regulators establish the particulars of what open banking will look like, one thing seems clear: much like in the UK, the advent of open data and seamless account-to-account (A2A) money movement will likely increase fragmentation and impact share of dollars kept in the “primary banking” relationship unless that provider is serving up the very best rates.
How?
Ease of A2A money movement
Rules-driven (aka algorithmic) money movement based on risk appetite, timing of different cash flow needs and yield
In the future your average family may break *all* of their money up into buckets they need to access over 15, 30, 60 and 90 days+, with AI “re-balancing” their money all the time to optimize.
Sounds a lot more like web servers than static financial deposits, doesn’t it?
While this future of an always on, always optimizing version of consumer banking might not be a reality tomorrow, it feels almost certain that financial institutions (FIs) of all sizes will no longer be able to rely on steady paychecks (we didn’t even touch the explosion of 1099 income) into a direct deposit account as a predictor of primacy.
So what, then? A new time calls for a new playbook.
Enter the “Command Center” strategy: Become the very first place consumers turn to when they are even thinking about what to do with their money.
The Command Center strategy has a few key elements that banks will need to address:
From walletshare to mindshare: Moving from simply being a payment method or a place to store money to being a trusted partner and co-pilot
Lead with help: To be a partner, banks will need to create value in non-traditional, non-transactional parts of the journey. Don’t wait until a person is ready to buy a house to compete for their attention with rate and rewards… Give them tools and experiences to make and manage their long term buying plan.
New kinds of partnership models: Consumers have a large and increasing number of FI relationships. Rather than try to get those consumers to switch completely in service of the traditional primary relationship, smart institutions will leverage their institutional platforms to convene partners and create robust experiences; capturing commercials even when they don’t fully own the journey end to end.
We’re all going to need to learn new tricks to serve tomorrow’s customers in a dynamic market with new rules:
“I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.” - Neo
You ready?
Cheers,
Ron J Williams
Partner at Co-Created, Empire Startups Contributor
I’m a partner at Co-Created, one of the few “venture builder” firms specializing in helping large organizations make big, strategic bets on building better futures (aka “good growth”). That means I spend a LOT of time thinking about how we deliver real value. Not just ideas, workshops, and decks full of theoretically sound recommendations, but real value. Real progress. Real outcomes.
In this rapidly changing world, the needs of companies, their customers and the world as a whole are shifting at warp speed, which means those of us who bring the “outside-in” must continue to evolve to meet corporate partners where they are at…with more than billable hours and advice.
How should we do that? Why do I think this way? Strap in…
(Easter egg at the bottom for music fans)
State of the advice business
Last weekend, I found myself with a rare hour alone (I have two little girls), engrossed in a Wall Street Journal article on the current state of management consulting. The headline: we are seeing a seismic shift in the industry. For the first time, leading firms are not just downsizing their workforce but are also parting ways with partners, a previously unheard-of practice. A 2022, a report cited that the management consulting market had grown to $973.67 billion in spend globally, reaching a fever pitch during the pandemic. So what changed in the last two years?
Rising interest rates, fears of looming recession, and an uncertain geopolitical climate has caused global enterprises to scale back investment in external “for-hire” expertise and change management. The environment is now very different from the record-setting years of early pandemic when large enterprises poured billions into consultant coffers to get help imagining transformation in an all-of-a-sudden remotely working, masked, terrified and economically dislocated world. Now, more companies are taking the reins themselves, increasingly choosing to internalize the monumental tasks of envisioning their futures and driving transformation.
This shift reaffirms a long-held belief of mine that the management consulting role and business model are rooted in a bygone era: One in which the pace of change in business was slower. Before software began “eating the world” and the information revolution brought us not just the world’s information in our pockets (thanks internet, qualcomm, apple, google) but now the means to critically analyze that information in seconds (thanks AI).
Management consulting’s core value proposition historically was about professionalizing ‘management’ itself: 1) helping good leaders consistently make great decisions in service of shareholder value and 2) managing complexity through rigorous research, analysis, and benchmarking to well-understood standards. The best do it so very well. And truly, some of the brightest and most successful executives I’ve encountered in business are former consultants.
The consultants aren't the problem. The model is.
The management consulting model is at its best when change can be easily dimensioned and predicted, based on historical precedent. But the accelerating pace of disruption over the last 30 years has demonstrated that exponential change from novel sources is impossible to accurately predict from the safety of your desk. Advice based on models does not cut it. You have to get your hands dirty building the future to really understand the future.
💡When access to expertise and critical analysis was hard to come by, establishing and standardizing frameworks that could then be packaged with advisory was brisk business.
💡So was becoming the trusted partner for optimization and financial engineering that signaled professional management, efficiency and fiscal responsibility. The street loved it all.
However, as the world adjusts to a pace of change that only continues to accelerate, the traditional consulting model of dispassionate, research-based opinion falls short. Why?
Because at some point providing opinions without having "skin in the game" or direct accountability for execution and the long-term success of the organization, leaves the "client" short.
In a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.
Tell me something I don't know
A former colleague at a large company once said to me that consultants are paid millions “to take your watch and tell you the time.” More generously IMO, management consultants often serve as highly effective tiebreakers, lending their reputation and brand weight to confirming what clients may already suspect, rather than challenging clients to explore less familiar, riskier, unventured paths.
This all hit home for me and our work at Co-Created when a corporate partner, who genuinely valued our collaboration, referred to us as "the best consultants" they had ever worked with. Great vibes to be sure, and yet I found myself internally stuck on the label. Consultants. Who, me? Us?
That moment led me to explore what truly differentiates a partner from a consultant. We at Co-Created consider ourselves “partners,” and “operators,” not consultants. Why? Because partnership is not about delivering a presentation and walking away; it's about ownership of outcomes, about being as invested in the success of an initiative as our clients are. It's about rolling up sleeves and doing the doing—opportunity identifying, venture building, growth fostering, co-creating—activities that go beyond advice and counsel. It’s getting in the trenches at all levels of the organization; digging in with the business leads, testing with marketers, building alongside the PMs, not just behind closed doors in the boardroom. We embrace risk, we innovate, we deliver—not just once, but repeatedly, iterating beyond the initial idea to truly meet the market and its real-world complexities arm-in-arm with our corporate partners.
Why "Partner" mindset?
We believe our role is to de-risk the future for our partners, transforming the first good idea into an even better reality through rapid experimentation and testing in the market. Our work with leading organizations across industries goes beyond advisory to actively participating in the creation and operationalization of real-world offerings; often paving the way for these solutions to be internalized, built, and launched at enterprise scale by our partners.
Co-Created is composed of founders, operators, and builders who understand the gravity of taking risks for long-term growth and are willing to build that future alongside our partners. Our commitment is to not just predict but to actively shape the outcomes alongside our partners. In this rapidly evolving business landscape, our mission is to help companies boldly build better futures - delivering value beyond this quarter’s earnings call.
We don’t simply sell advice or time. We de-risk. We develop. We deliver. Beyond the deck. We value learning through experimentation, focusing on the right problems and moving fast because we know the only way to navigate uncertainty is to do.
So for those of you who maybe aren't familiar with how we use venture building to unlock impactful new growth and then double down, reach out. Always happy to chat.
