Running on instinct
By his own account, Rajneesh Mittal, founder and CEO of Algorizz, has always run on instinct. Hard work, sincerity and a varied career carried him a long way, but he also tends to say the thing before checking whether it suits the room. After a few decades in business, he admits he still lands on the politically incorrect side more often than not.
When nothing gets absorbed
Across 25 years of corporate life, that mostly worked. In a large organisation, enough people and process sit around any one person that a stray instinct rarely travels far, and the system usually smooths it over. That cuts both ways: the same layers that absorb a bad call can quietly absorb a good idea too. In a young startup like Algorizz, nothing gets absorbed. Every edge shows up in the room, the email and the video call. The founder’s instinct becomes house policy, and nobody softens it.
A sparring partner
AI has started to fill in what was missing. Mittal describes Claude[1] as a sparring partner that challenges him, keeps him sharp and never makes him feel foolish. More than once it has advised him to let silence do the work in a negotiation. He followed the advice, uncomfortable as it was, and it worked.
Average, in the best sense
The reason it works is not that the model is brilliant. It is average, in the best sense of the word. A large language model[2] has absorbed what people at large have written, said and done, so it gives the usual answer rather than the clever one: how a room normally behaves, and what people usually mean when they say “this is very interesting, let’s stay in touch” and then go quiet for twelve weeks. That median view of the world[3] is exactly what Mittal says he lacked. He had the conviction. AI is supplying the context.
“I had conviction. AI is now giving me the context.
For everything else
In front of clients, though, the AI stays in the background. What clients pay for, Mittal argues, is still the edges and odd angles: fresh thinking and the instinctive application of experience gathered over years. Without that, a consultant is just one more person with a polished AI-generated deck that anyone could produce for twenty dollars. The instinct and nuance are what make the difference, much like a Dhoni helicopter shot. For everything else, there is AI.
