Attensi is the global leader in AI and Game-Based training solutions by creating a ‘learning by doing’ environment.
Huw Newton-Hill, GM North America, shares the details of Attensi, and what it’s like to work there.
We discuss:
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- Details on Attensi
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- Details on the platform and how AI is utilized
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- The latest with Attensi
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- The culture at Attensi
- Why is now a great time to join Attensi?
Video Transcript
Thank you. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Brilliant. Thanks for having me. It’s great to connect after a couple of years.
I know it’s been a few years since we last chatted. So, it was time to bring our audience up to speed on all the great things happening at Attensi.
If people aren’t familiar with the company, what does Attensi do?
Yeah, absolutely. Very happy to run through that. So, Attensi is a really interesting company. We operate at the intersection of:
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Human psychology: Thinking how do people develop? How do we trigger different parts of the brain?
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The latest technology.
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Business performance: Having a measurable impact on the business.
When it comes down to it, what does that actually look like? We at the moment are building game-based simulations driven by Gen AI to help people build skills and practice behaviors in workplaces that resonate with them. We are taking that concept of building experience in a safe environment, but bringing that to enterprises across the world in a variety of different contexts.
That’s a perfect complement for that gamified training aspect, but having the AI powering the scenarios.
Yes. Exactly. AI is completely embedded within our platform. I would love to claim AI native—I don’t know if we’re allowed to do that because we founded before this Gen AI boom—but really as close to AI native as we can get.
It is empowering two main areas:
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Content Creation: Our authoring tools and developer tools that instructional designers or businesses are using are fully AI supported. You can have a conversation with an agent that’s creating this training with you, using our best practices and sparring with them to say, “These are what I think the challenges are for my business. Can you recommend an outline of a training course?” You can have that conversation back with them.
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User Experience: What the end-user or the learner experiences on a day-to-day basis. Gen AI has really unlocked the ability to personalize at scale. Each of the simulations that you’re going through are highly personalized to you as an individual, completely adaptive in that depending on what you say or the decisions that you make, the simulation brings a different aspect to that.
One of the really powerful things is it brings a lot more variation than traditional learning technologies have been able to have in the past. Traditional learning experiences are very linear. Really what we’re doing now is we want people to repeat the training because this really is training. People are practicing it multiple times, and that’s a core differentiator for us. You see people taking the training three, four, five, six times. You need to practice it, get feedback, practice again, get feedback, and that’s how people develop, and ultimately that’s how they build confidence, which is such a huge unlock.
Attensi is a global organization, headquartered in Oslo, Norway. You head up North America for Attensi. So what’s the latest with the company?
Yeah, it’s great. I think when we look at the US specifically, we’re growing rapidly. It is the place where we expect to see the biggest growth. As a global organization, we raised another round of funding in May, over 25 million to help support our growth. That’s really exciting. It allows us to invest in places where we’ve kind of taken a lot of bets and we know what works. I really see this funding round as an opportunity for us to double down on the bets that we have seen work.
We’re in a really great space sort of coming out of the two years of Gen AI figuring out what this means for us. We came back to the realization that our core pillars remain the same. We really are just focused on creating impact for the businesses that we serve.
A really exciting update from Boston is that we’re moving into a new office. We’ve got a fantastic office at the Verizon Rapid 7 building near TD Garden at North Station in Boston. We’ll be moving in there, fingers crossed, mid-September. We feel like this new space will allow us to really double down on a couple of things that we’ve identified as part of our high-performance culture.
Well, that’s a perfect segue. So what’s the culture like working at Attensi?
Yeah, it’s great. I’ve been here seven and a half, eight years now. And the vast majority of executive leadership have longer tenure than that. If that’s a good indication of a great place to be, that’s something I hang my hat on. If I look at the values that we’ve had really since I’ve joined, the three are:
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People-Powered
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Super-Fast
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Game Changers
These were defined when we were like a 25-30 person organization, and we’ve really stuck true to them. We don’t see a need to change them.
Well, top-tier talent regardless of market conditions, they always have different options in front of them for their career. So why is now the ideal time to join Attensi?
Yeah, it’s great. There’s so many reasons. If I call out a few, I think we’re really a mission-driven organization. We exist to make people better at their jobs and more confident in what they’re doing. That really resonates with a lot of people who join. We work with a lot of pro bono partners to support work, such as helping refugees in Syria and Ukraine deal with mental health challenges. We see that with our standard corporate customers as well—we see people building confidence and skill sets.
I think the timing is also unique. If you look at HBR’s top 10 use cases for Gen AI in 2024, two of them were learning related (enhanced learning and personalized learning). Move forward to 2025, and enhanced learning has jumped up to the fourth most exciting use case. There’s broad recognition that this Gen AI boom is going to enable new modalities of learning. Joining a company that’s at the forefront of that wave of innovation is a really exciting place to be.
For our commercial resources, we have invested three years in understanding this market. We’ve taken bets and we know where to invest in better places. We’re starting to build that brand and market awareness that we didn’t have a couple of years ago. We’ve seen ourselves being referenced in Gartner and Forrester reports. As a commercial resource stepping into a company where you have that market awareness and brand recognition is a really exciting part.
And ultimately, we are still building the team. We have a mantra that I’m still using, and I think it is still going to be relevant: saying “these are the good old days.” If we look five years down the line, joining now, we’ll be able to look back and say, “These were the good old days.” There’s a lot of growth and a lot we’re setting out to achieve, and now is a great time to join the team.
Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Attensi, you need to go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their job listings. Go to venturefizz.com/attensi.
Huw, thanks so much for taking the time to bring our audience up to speed on all the great things happening at the company.
Brilliant. Thanks, Keith. And great to connect and hope to do this again in the near future.
