How AI development agency Odyss is using Rise to stay on track
Applying the latest technology to unlock impact and better business
Odyss is a recently founded company which has their headquarters in Amsterdam. The team specializes in helping companies improve and reinvent themselves using AI. In their words: ‘Building Better Business through Artificial Intelligence’. We spoke with Nolan Rook, CTO, and asked them how they work. Additionally, we asked how they use Rise to manage their projects and operate with fast moving assignments and clients.
There are – obviously – a ton of companies that have been jumping on the AI bandwagon in the last couple of months. Odyss is one of them. Rook: “It’s our goal to help save time, and to help spend a lot less effort on things like research and content creation, but also help teams speed up complicated analysis of financial data and metrics. To make that tangible: we’ve created a customizable assistant that hooks into Slack or Microsoft Teams, that allows one of our clients to streamline their marketing and sales efforts.” Rook showed us a demo where, right from within Slack, he was guided with a few questions to draft an outline and publication about a topic of choice. “There’s so much potential in these models, especially when combining them: when using OpenAI together with Perplexity (which serves an up-to-date model) you can get amazing results. But with so many options it can be hard to get started and apply. We help make the use of it consistent and tailored towards what our clients need.” He shared one of their projects where they help spot anomalies in monthly reports for a VC firm, and also shared an example where they combine transcripts of calls with a few follow up questions to help scaffold project proposals.
Rook has always been into productivity, he shares, and he’s often the one to bring in new tactics and tools at work. To stay on track and accountable himself, he meets with a friend on a weekly basis to share plans and goals. Rook: “it’s one thing to set goals and tasks for yourself, but it helps a lot to talk about it with someone else and to make sure all of it is clear and actionable.”
How are you using Rise at Odyss?
“Rise is a central piece of software for us. It’s where everything happens. We have a Monday morning meeting with everyone in the team which – before Rise – used to be fairly unstructured. Everyone had their own goals, but those were not very visible to the rest of the team. So we started to look for a product that could help us out there. When we heard Rise launching support for tasks and projects we decided to jump on it.”
“Our Monday morning meeting is still a key part of our week, and basically we put Rise up on a big screen and everyone shares what their plans are for the week. On Friday, we ask everyone to prepare their tasks for the week ahead and put those in the Todo column. It’s super powerful to have both our schedules and our key tasks in one place, which keeps us focused and on track. One effect we didn’t really foresee but actually works, is that our plans are a lot more realistic now, since we have to map them out in our calendars. And because everything is visible for everyone in the team, we don’t have to spend time asking about progress anymore–we can just see where things are at.”
“Since then we actually started to use Rise way more extensively and basically use it to track all our projects. Our marketing manager is using Rise to map out our content calendar, for example. There it works really well, too.”
What is next for Odyss?
“We are focused on helping teams do more with AI. We see that this chat-based approach works really well and we’re excited to roll that out to a lot more teams. There’s a lot of new problems to figure out: how do you make sure you’re not automating work that people actually enjoy most? We want people to have more time and space to work on new ideas and to simply give the people that work with our tools more fulfilling days.”
