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AI Agents for Business: ZenBusiness Ships an AI Co-Founder. ZenBusiness launched Velo Prime on Tuesday, a product it describes as an AI co-founder that builds and operates a real business on your behalf, from the first idea to the first dollar. A set of specialized agents handles the execution behind the scenes, and the whole thing runs through a single conversation. I have watched a lot of founders die on the gap between having an idea and shipping it. AI agents for business are aimed squarely at that gap, and this launch is the most complete attempt I have seen at closing it for someone with no team and no budget. What Velo Prime actually does on day one. The first phase is not a demo. A founder gets a live website, SEO pages that keep improving, custom blog content written and deployed by agents, payment collection wired through Stripe Connect, automated marketing emails, and a dedicated business inbox. Put plainly, that is most of the setup work that eats a founder's first three months. ZenBusiness says the agents keep working while you are offline, continually assessing where the business stands and what it needs next. Velo Prime capabilities as announced on August 18, 2026 | Available now | Planned in coming months | | Live website | Entity formation and compliance filings | | Continuously improved SEO pages | Customer-facing applications | | AI-written blog content | Custom domains | | Stripe Connect payments | Paid advertising | | Marketing emails and business inbox | / | The company brings real context to this. It has spent more than a decade helping close to one million small business owners get started, which is a very different training ground than a generic model has. The approval step is the interesting part. Velo Prime surfaces its proposed next move and waits for you to approve it before acting. That single design choice is what separates a useful agent from an expensive liability. Full autonomy sounds great until an agent emails your entire list at 2 a.m. with a positioning statement you would never have signed off on. Approval gates keep the speed while leaving the judgment with the person whose name is on the company. ZenBusiness CEO and co-founder Ross Buhrdorf framed the problem the way most founders would recognize it, arguing that the idea is rarely what stops people and that time and resources to execute are the real barrier. Where an AI co-founder falls short. Be honest about what this does not solve. An agent can publish a page about your product. It cannot tell you whether anyone wants the product, and that is the question that kills most companies. It also cannot make the calls. Talking to twenty potential customers, hearing what actually frustrates them, and changing your offer as a result is still entirely on you, and no amount of automated content substitutes for it. Then there is the sameness risk. If thousands of founders launch with agent-generated sites and blog posts, differentiation stops coming from execution speed and starts coming from taste, point of view, and the relationships you build. The solopreneur economy is already crowded for exactly this reason. How to use agents without outsourcing judgment. Here is the rule I would give any founder trying this. Automate the work that has one right answer, and keep the work that requires a decision. Setting up a payment flow has one right answer. Choosing what to charge does not. Publishing a blog post has one right answer once you know the topic. Deciding which customer problem you are solving does not. * Let agents handle setup, formatting, and scheduling. * Write your positioning and pricing yourself. * Read every outbound message before approving it. * Spend the hours you save talking to customers. Treat the time savings as a budget you reinvest, not a break you take. Founders who evaluate AI tools for startups on hours returned rather than features shipped tend to get far more out of them. What ships next and why it matters. The roadmap is the ambitious part. ZenBusiness plans to add entity formation, compliance filings, custom domains, customer-facing applications, and paid advertising, which would take a business from idea to legally operating company inside one product. That crosses into territory where mistakes are expensive. Entity choice affects your taxes and your liability for years, so read the SBA guidance on choosing a business structure before letting any tool file on your behalf. Watch the category too. Enterprise buyers are already paying serious money for AI agents, and the same capability arriving at the solo-founder end of the market is what makes this launch worth tracking. Questions about running a business on agents. Can this replace hiring a first employee? For setup tasks, often yes. For anything requiring a relationship or a judgment call, no. Do I still need to understand SEO and email? Enough to evaluate the output. You cannot approve work you do not understand. What if the agent gets something wrong? You own it. Legal and financial responsibility stays with the business owner regardless of which tool produced the work. Start now, but start with the customer conversation. The agents will handle the rest faster than you can, and that has never been the hard part anyway.

Altus announces CFO transition. Published: July 27, 2026 at 10:17AM EDT TORONTO, July 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Altus Group Limited ("Altus" or "the Company") (TSX: AIF), a leading provider of commercial real estate ("CRE") intelligence, today announced that Katie Royce will join the Company as Chief Financial Officer ("CFO"), effective August 3. At that time, Pawan Chhabra, will step down as CFO and will remain with the Company into September to support an orderly transition. Mr. Chhabra, who joined in January 2023, has played a critical role in helping transform Altus into a pure-play technology company. With that transformation largely complete, the Company believes now is the right time to implement its CFO succession. Ms. Royce, who will be based in New York, will lead Altus' global finance organization, partnering with the Chief Executive Officer ("CEO") and the Executive Committee to support disciplined execution of its strategy, capital allocation, and long-term stakeholder value creation. "Katie's experience scaling high-growth platform companies will be invaluable," said Mike Gordon, CEO and Chair of Altus. "She is a proven operator at the intersection of finance, technology and strategy, who has built and led modern finance organizations that fuel innovation, growth and performance. She's keen to hit the ground running to help us execute our value creation strategy and accelerate our path to Rule of 40." Mr. Gordon added: "On behalf of the Company's stakeholders, I want to thank Pawan for his many contributions to Altus. He guided the Company through significant change providing us with a strong financial foundation to scale and profitably grow the business. We wish him continued success." Ms. Royce, who is a CFA Charterholder, brings more than two decades of experience across finance, investor relations, corporate strategy, operations and enterprise transformation across public and venture-backed companies. Most recently, Ms. Royce served as CFO of ZenBusiness, Inc., a SaaS company providing services for entrepreneurs. Prior to that, she held senior finance roles at Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, a publicly-traded technology services provider, including Senior Vice President, North America CFO and Head of Investor Relations. Katie's experience also includes working in various investor relations and treasury roles, as well as a buy-side research analyst. "I'm excited to join Altus at this important inflection point," said Ms. Royce, incoming CFO. "Altus has market-leading technology, deep data assets and a clear opportunity to shape the future of CRE intelligence as the industry enters a new era shaped by AI. I look forward to working with Mike and the leadership team to build on that foundation, scale the platform and drive the next phase of performance." The Company also announced today that it is reaffirming its financial outlook for the second quarter and full year 2026, as provided on May 7, 2026, and that it will be announcing its final divestiture transaction imminently. As part of the transition, both Mr. Chhabra and Ms. Royce will participate in the Company's second quarter earnings call planned for August 6. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Camilla Bartosiewicz Chief Communications Officer, Altus Group (416) 641-9773 [email protected] Altus Group Limited NEWS RELEASE TRANSMITTED BY Globe Newswire Globenewswire