Enterprise AI · Venture building
Ziplabs explores where AI can change how enterprises work. It builds the product and the system around it, then develops the strongest opportunities into new businesses.
What we do
The gaps are rarely only technical. A product has to fit how people work, the system has to hold up in daily use and the economics have to justify the change. We work on all three together, from customer discovery through product development to the business case.
01
Customer discovery around an expensive problem, and a reason AI now changes what is possible.
02
Who the product serves, what it replaces and why an enterprise would adopt it.
03
Where the path stays fixed, where an agent decides and what it may touch.
04
Building the software, with the evaluations, tracing and recovery that hold up in daily use.
05
Evidence from users and buyers that the product is worth adopting and paying for.
06
Go-to-market, pricing, partnerships and the team the business requires.
Perspective
The model matters. So does the software built around it and the business it has to serve. These views shape what we pursue and how we build.
The opportunity is a workflow that is expensive today and people willing to change how they do it. The choice of model, and how much autonomy it gets, follows from that.
Related terms: Workflow redesign · Adoption
Where the path is known, a fixed workflow is usually easier to predict and test. An agent loop is worth its cost when the next step depends on what the last one found. A second agent needs a reason of its own, such as work that can run in parallel.
Related terms: Agentic workflows · Orchestration · Multi-agent
The software around the model keeps task state, selects what each call sees and carries out tool calls. Context is chosen for relevance and stale material is cleared as the task runs. Memory that outlives a task needs rules of its own.
Related terms: Agent harness · Context engineering · Memory
MCP and A2A make tools, data and other agents easier to reach, and scopes can narrow what a connection may touch. Which business action an agent should take, and on whose behalf, remains a decision about identity and ownership.
Related terms: MCP · A2A · Delegated authority
Evaluations run tasks that resemble the real work and check the resulting records rather than the agent’s report of success. Traces explain failures. Idempotent operations keep a retry from sending a payment or a message twice.
Related terms: Evaluations · Observability · Idempotency
Token prices are the visible cost. The unit economics rest on what it costs to deliver a result the customer accepts, with discarded attempts counted and the customer’s review effort measured beside it. The choice of model shifts both, along with how quickly a result arrives.
Related terms: Unit economics · Model selection · Latency
AI usage can grow while the business stays the same. Value appears when a workflow is redesigned around what the system does well, people come to rely on it and the result is worth what it costs to run. A competitor cannot copy that by adopting the same model.
Related terms: Adoption · Workflow redesign · Defensibility
Current work
Agents take on enterprise work that is costly to get wrong, where the next step depends on interpretation and the result has to be trusted by the people accountable for it.
When an incident unfolds, the evidence arrives in pieces across alerts, logs, tickets and identity records. The hard part is turning those pieces into an understanding coherent enough to act on.
Direction
Investigation that is faster and better grounded, with conclusions tied to the evidence behind them and the response decision left with the people accountable for it.
As agents begin to act across enterprise systems, organizations need to grant useful autonomy and still know what was done, on whose authority and with what result.
Direction
Autonomy granted in proportion to what a task requires and what an agent has shown it can do reliably, with the authority behind each action clear and its effects open to review.
Insights
Essays on enterprise AI, agents and the businesses around them.
· Updated · 11 min read
Most useful systems combine fixed steps with steps where a model decides what to do next. The design work is choosing which is which, and building the harness that makes both dependable.
Read the essay· 10 min read
When a model does part of the work, customers buy results and each result carries its own delivery cost. Adoption depends on trust in the output, and the lasting advantage sits in the workflow around the model.
· 6 min read
Early in a venture, a measure is worth tracking when it would change the next commitment of time or money. That rules out some familiar counts and brings commercial signals such as willingness to pay forward.
Sajjad's career runs from hands-on engineering in AI and machine learning, distributed systems and databases to founder, CPO and CEO roles. At Ziplabs he connects product, engineering and commercial decisions on the same problem.
About Ziplabs and its founderContact
We welcome conversations with enterprise leaders, founders, investors and potential partners working on problems where AI could change how the work gets done.