Descent · We make companies AI-native

01The thesis

The future of work is agentic. Software does the work. People direct it.

In every company, the highest-value thing a person does is shifting from doing the task to running the agents that do it. We help businesses get there.

You direct the agents, and each agent runs its own team of agents.

02What we do

Foundations

We make companies AI‑native.

We make people AI-fluent and shift the culture to AI-first. We start at the top, with shareholders and executives, because culture only changes when the expectation of leadership changes.

Custom builds

We build agents into operations.

We build agents for the work that drives revenue, customer service, and operational efficiency, from onboarding new clients, answering customer queries, and chasing overdue invoices.

Joint ventures

Flagship

We co-found new AI companies.

The biggest opportunities today sit where deep domain expertise meets AI. What once took years and millions now takes months and a fraction of that. We pair deep domain knowledge with our coding agents and build a new company together.

03How it works

Agents, built on the company brain.

Every agent runs off a brain that holds your data, your systems and your expertise. It remembers context and decisions, and learns from every action and correction, so it works with the judgement of your most experienced people and gets better the more it is used.

SourcesThe brainAgents

04Inside GoTyme

We changed how an entire bank works.

When we started, almost no one at the bank used AI. Here's how we changed that.

Top-down workshops

We ran AI workshops from the top down, starting with the board and executives.

A standard for everyone

Every employee had to meet it, including building their own AI agent.

Agents into production

A specialist team shipped agents into the worst back-office bottlenecks.

Embedded everywhere

Teams moved into every business unit until AI was how the company ran.

20M

customers across two continents

1,600+

people trained to work with AI

3 → 37

specialist AI team, in a year

70+

agentic systems in production

05Who we are

Why we built Descent.

Andrew Pfaff

Founder

David Sithole

Founder

We were lucky. We got to lead GoTyme's AI transformation end to end, taking the bank from almost no AI to deeply AI-native: a team of 37 AI engineers and more than 70 agentic systems in production across the org. We were given real room to experiment, made plenty of mistakes, and learned an enormous amount. Now we want to do it again, and get other companies there faster.

What stayed with us was the distance. The gap between the people using AI well and everyone else has become enormous: the top 1% of engineers now ship 46x more code than the median. It began in software, but it's spreading fast. Anthropic, worth hundreds of billions, ran its whole growth marketing with one person.

The businesses that win, we think, will get two things right: their people directing teams of AI agents, and the data and systems underneath that compound as the models keep improving.

And the same shift lets us go further. Pairing deep domain expertise with AI, we can start whole new companies in months. Building those alongside the people who know a market best is what excites us most, and why Descent exists.

The name

Why we're called Descent.

Almost every modern AI model learns the same way: with each step it tunes itself to make its errors a little smaller. Visualised on a graph, each step moves downhill toward the point where the gradient flattens to zero. That process is called gradient descent. How it works ↗

The only way to truly become AI-native is to descend knowledge and expectations from the top down: from shareholders to the board and executives, and on to every employee.

We made a $1.5bn digital bank AI‑native.