Steven Aberle Of Rohirrim: How AI Is Disrupting Our Industry, and What We Can Do About It
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Next is how you’ll leverage your organization’s data. Enterprises traditionally rely on the structured data in their centralized databases and financial systems. However, up to 85% of corporate data is unstructured and is contained in emails, chats, slide decks, PDFs, and so on.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer the future; it is the present. It’s reshaping landscapes, altering industries, and quickly transforming our lives and work. With its rapid advancement, AI is causing disruption — for better or worse — in every field imaginable. While it promises efficiency and growth, it also brings challenges and uncertainties that professionals and businesses must navigate. What can one do to pivot if AI is disrupting their industry? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Aberle.
Steven Aberle is an innovative entrepreneur and leader with a diverse professional background and a track record of success in data engineering and Generative AI.
In early 2022, he founded Rohirrim AI, the creator of the first domain-aware generative AI solution for enterprises. The Rohan AI platform leverages enterprise data to create unique, deeply technical content written in an organization’s distinctive voice. Rohan enables organizations to generate original, contextually relevant content for proposals, grants, white papers, and more based on the enterprise’s proprietary data. Teams can unlock the value hidden in their information repositories by securely capturing and organizing unstructured data from presentations, spreadsheets, emails, chats, and more — and then use that information to generate original and highly context-specific content.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Early in my career, as an engineer in the Washington, D.C., area, I naturally got involved in technology for the public sector, military, intelligence community, and aerospace and defense. Technology acquisition in the public sector is driven by requests for proposals or RFPs. Government organizations issue an RFP, and technology vendors respond with a detailed, highly technical written proposal for how they’ll design and implement a solution. As I moved throughout that career, more and more time became dedicated to pursuing new business and becoming deeply involved in the business development and proposal process.
That RFP process is a huge challenge to the vendors that deliver solutions that protect our nation. Writing proposals is costly and time-consuming. I long felt that there had to be a better way.
With the advent of Large Language Models — the technology behind solutions like ChatGPT — I realized there was an opportunity to transform not just the RFP process but any situation where an organization needs to produce domain-specific content based on proprietary data for any work product — but this must be done securely and with the organization’s own data sources. That was the impetus behind founding Rohirrim.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Our Rohan platform is the first domain-aware generative AI solution, having deployed to large enterprises before the advent of the ChatGPT revolution. It can enable any enterprise to unleash the value of its intellectual property by capturing and organizing the unstructured data contained in the repository of documents behind-the-firewall.
What’s different about Rohan is that it’s trained on each organization’s unique, private data. That’s in contrast to solutions trained on and relying exclusively on public, generalized data scraped from the internet. In fact, we earned a patent for our domain-aware gen AI approach and early implementations of Retrieval Augmented Generative (RAG) AI, which we called Vector Attributable Language Models (VALs). It’s also why we’ve attracted millions of dollars in venture capital and are already generating millions of dollars in revenue serving organizations in the public and private sectors.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I’ve always believed that to be a successful leader is that whatever you do, you must maintain a severe dedication to the problem you are solving and the users you serve. You must eat, breathe, and sleep it. Your mission needs to animate you at the core of your being.
The second character trait is a religious focus on the customer. I spend more than half my time at customer sites. I love being in the trenches with customers, showing them how they can use our solution to transform their processes. And I love fostering that culture within Rohirrim. There are hundreds of management books on how to be a good leader, and they contain deep wisdom. But many make it more complicated than it needs to be. Building a passionate team that’s laser-focused on serving customers is a big part of success. A relationship with a customer you serve is a partnership — we lend our strength, speed, and technical depth, which is tremendously additive to them. For their part, they lend us their corporate intelligence, their guidance, and understanding of their unique situation. Together, we achieve a richness that alone neither can.
A final character trait is finding and applying empathy at every level of the organization and in every interaction. The specifics of that will be different for every leader. For me, a lot is nurturing relationships — in my personal life, with my team, and with our customers. Another aspect is personal integrity, remaining true to your values in every situation. Our successes are defined and measured by how closely we can truly understand our customers, ourselves, and technology.
Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry?
People have been implementing AI for decades, but early progress was slow to bring immediate and tangible value. With the emergence of LLMs, AI is poised to transform many of our lives. And we’re just beginning to discover what LLMs can do.
For organizations, Large Language Models (LLMs) represent an inflection point. A transformational technology like this occurs once every 25 years or even once a generation. Twenty-five years ago, it was the Internet and Cloud Computing shortly after. It’s hard to overstate how transformative those technologies were. Generative AI will undoubtedly have a broader and deeper impact on organizations’ operations and business.
Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?
Numerous forms of AI are already embedded in smartphones, cars, and digital services. But LLMs will have an even more profound impact, and that impact will be more visible.
Specific to the AI technology Rohirrim offers, we can transform the RFP process for any organization where that is a mission-critical function. It’s essential to recognize just how onerous the current manual process is. On any given day, tens of thousands of RFPs are issued, and some 100,000 vendors vie for that business.
Vendors need to dedicate large, highly skilled teams to responding to RFPs. Startups that have great technology but only 10 or 20 employees may not have the resources or knowledge to submit compliant proposals. The ability of our Rohan platform to instantly ingest, normalize, and leverage proprietary unstructured data to generate proposals is truly transformative.
Of course, our domain-aware approach can serve many other use cases. In addition to government and defense, industries such as engineering, energy, insurance, law, business consulting, commercial real estate, and higher education are already benefiting.
Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?
Witnessing the power and potential of early transformer models was something I’ll never forget. It was very early — think GPT-1. But more personally, every moment I spent writing RFPs, the two words I couldn’t shake, ever-present in the back of my mind, were “language models.” The RFP process is brutal, and last-minute changes often require teams to work nights and weekends. I remember being stuck on an hours-long team call on a Saturday afternoon to finish a proposal that was due on Monday. That Saturday was my daughter’s birthday, and I missed her birthday party to sit in on that call. I was distraught that I was forced to choose between completing the work and missing an important milestone for my daughter.
I realized there were thousands of teams like mine manually producing proposals on their days off. And I recognized that new AI capabilities could solve that problem. That’s a great reason to create a company, to solve a problem in a way that actually transforms people’s lives.
How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?
AI capabilities can be transformative for knowledge workers. AI tools can offload knowledge workers of rote tasks that involve lower-level thinking, reserving their time for higher-level thinking tasks they are in a better position to perform. That will have a dramatic impact on how organizations handle knowledge-dense tasks that couldn’t be automated in the past.
But it also means knowledge workers and their employers have to consider how they’ll use the time they’ve been given back. Automating certain tasks with AI also requires thinking about how you’ll redeploy knowledge workers for more creative and innovative activities.
What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?
One thing we’ve learned is that you can’t just drop a gen-AI solution on an organization’s doorstep and expect them to instantly realize optimal return on investment. That’s because gen AI is a probabilistic solution that most people aren’t used to working with.
Traditional software applications are deterministic. There are standard inputs and outputs that work the same way every time. Probabilistic solutions like gen AI are different. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input. These differences require specialized training so that organizations can gain the greatest benefits from AI.
What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?
The companies that develop AI solutions, as well as the organizations that use those solutions, need to be mindful of aligning the system’s capabilities and behaviors with human values and objectives. Otherwise, the system could produce output that’s biased or otherwise has undesirable effects. For instance, LLMs that are trained on the open internet will reflect any bias contained in that dataset.
That’s why our Rohan platform is trained only on specific, trusted knowledge sources, along with each customer’s proprietary internal data. That corporate data is already governed by the organization’s acceptable use policies and other internal guidelines.
What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?
1. First is AI training and knowledge-building. For individuals, that means arming yourself with information about how AI will affect their role. For instance, gen AI won’t replace proposal writers. But over the next few years, proposal writers trained in using gen AI will replace those who aren’t.
2. Second is understanding potential AI impacts on the business environment — creating new roles, eliminating others, and driving change in the workforce. For instance, human and machine teaming will become increasingly common. Enterprise leaders must recognize how these changes will affect recruiting, staffing, employee skill development, etc.
3. Third is business speed. Many organizations already operate at a breakneck pace. AI will enable them to execute even faster. Enterprises that lag in adopting AI will quickly fall behind. It will become imperative for businesses to leverage AI to achieve desired outcomes in the shortest amount of time.
4. Next is how you’ll leverage your organization’s data. Enterprises traditionally rely on the structured data in their centralized databases and financial systems. However, up to 85% of corporate data is unstructured and is contained in emails, chats, slide decks, PDFs, and so on.
Gen AI will enable enterprises to quickly organize and leverage that information. This represents a tremendous opportunity. However, organizations must be deliberate on which unstructured data they use to train the gen AI models that will power their business.
5. The final issues are cybersecurity and data privacy. The security protections of the past decade or two are built around safeguarding centralized, structured data. Now, organizations will be working with decentralized, unstructured data. They’ll also be evaluating gen-AI solutions trained on open internet data.
Enterprises will need to think carefully about whether their AI solutions will access only internal data or connect to external data sources. They’ll need to weigh the advantages of using LLMs against potential risks around security and privacy.
What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?
There are two primary misconceptions about LLMs. First is that general-purpose AI solutions like ChatGPT can solve every business problem. But as powerful as ChatGPT is, it’s limited by the fact that it’s trained on open Internet data. It’s not trained on your organization’s proprietary data and intellectual property.
That’s why we created Rohan. Because it’s securely trained on each organization’s unique dataset, it’s domain-aware and context-specific. It’s also able to leverage all the unstructured data contained in files like presentations, spreadsheets, and emails.
The second misconception is that AI will replace people. AI will change some people’s roles. But it’s an assistive technology that will make people more effective in those roles.
A good example is the role solution architects play in the proposal-writing process. Solution architects are excellent at designing software solutions. But they’re not necessarily good at creating a written explanation of how they’ll do that.
That’s where Rohan comes in. In milliseconds, it can sort through thousands of data artifacts specific to how an organization solved a particular problem in the past. It can even recommend how to solve the problem in the future. The solution architect can leverage that output in delivering a proposal. But the solution architect remains crucial to the process, assisted by the AI.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem “If” contains the line, “if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” That sentiment resonates deeply with me, and it’s a maxim I apply to the relentless pursuit of our mission here at Rohirrim. By embracing the “unforgiving minute,” we enable ourselves as a team to rally, accept fight instead of flight, and relentlessly forge a new path for our users, to whom we are absolutely and fanatically committed.
Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?
As a startup with early success, Rohirrim faces the challenges of rapid growth. In 2023, we doubled our headcount to 30 employees. This year, we’ll double our headcount again. Initially, we were operating in stealth mode, so we didn’t even have a sales team. So, we have specific roles it will be crucial to fill.
We’re also transitioning from a fully remote operation to having a physical office, which we plan to open in the Washington, D.C., area. For one thing, that will let us establish a training center where we can show customers how to maximize their investment in our technology.
Right now, we’re small enough that I can have a direct, personal relationship with every employee and every customer. At some point, that will no longer be realistic. So the thing that keeps me awake at night is how to maintain our fanatically customer-centric culture. That’s why it’s so important to build culture from day one so that it becomes ingrained and self-sustaining.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
This is quite a question! If I were given the chance to initiate a movement that could maximize benefit for the greatest number of people, I’d launch a campaign focused on “empowering through knowledge.” Such an initiative would aim to establish a worldwide network of knowledge hubs dedicated to providing accessible, in-depth scientific knowledge to areas where such resources are scarce. The goal would be to empower individuals with the understanding and insights they need to improve their lives and uplift their communities.
How can our readers further follow you online?
Rohirrim AI: Company Page | LinkedIn
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
