Innovation at the Intersection of Workplace & Technology with Avanto

The workplace is changing faster than the conversations guiding it. We’re stepping up with a sharper plan for Season Seven: weekly episodes designed to spark action, challenge assumptions, and give you practical tools to build spaces and businesses that actually work.

The term “AI-powered” is everywhere, but what does it mean and how are these tools helping our industry? Most teams are still stuck with the same bottlenecks: endless email threads, manual order checks, duplicate data entry, and mistakes that happen when systems don’t line up. 

Matt Danyliw, President and Co-Founder of Avanto, and Leonardo Vargas, Chief Innovation Officer, are tackling these issues with a completely new idea: AI that takes action inside real workflows, while humans stay in the loop to review results and handle edge cases.

We dig into what Avanto actually does across the contract interiors ecosystem, from dealers and manufacturers to rep groups, installers and even global enterprise end users. Their goal? Reduce risk, reduce cost and increase efficiency by speeding up collaboration and improving information quality. 

Matt explains why end user visibility matters so much at scale, especially when projects span various countries, multiple stakeholders, and tight timelines. Leo shares an outside-industry view on why resistance to change and fragmented processes slow adoption and how assessment and operational clarity make or break AI success.

You’ll also hear a clear breakdown of “tools vs intelligence” and why an AI wrapper on a CRM is not the same as autonomous, agentic workflows. The conversation gets specific for rep groups: how incoming bid-package emails can be evaluated, staged, and partially solved before a human ever hits send. 

We close with what they’re building with Strata, why AI-native operations are coming faster than people think, and how to start if you’re a small business leader asking where AI fits.

What process would you want an AI agent to take over first?

In this episode: