From Paperwork to $10B Valuations: Why AI Only Wins When It Fixes Real Problems
Sep 9, 2025
Every week, there’s a new AI headline. Another startup raising money. Another company boasting a unicorn valuation. Another round of hype about how “everything is changing.”
Most of it is noise. But every so often, two stories drop at the same time that - if you read between the lines - tell you exactly where the real game is.
This week gave us one of those moments:
Marloo, a New Zealand-founded AI startup, raised $4.6 million to cut paperwork for financial advisers.
Cognition AI, a US-based AI development platform, secured $400 million in funding, pushing its valuation above $10 billion.
One story is small and practical. The other is big and headline-grabbing. Put them together, and you see the truth: AI only wins when it solves pain.
The pain every business owner knows
I once had a client, a financial adviser, tell me something I’ll never forget:
"Glenn, I spend more hours typing up meeting notes, compliance docs, and client summaries than I do actually advising my clients. The paperwork takes more time than the advice."
If you run a business, you know that feeling. Maybe it’s buried in endless emails. Maybe it’s filling in forms nobody ever reads. Maybe it’s producing reports that look neat but don’t move the business an inch forward.
Admin is the silent tax on ambition.
And that’s exactly what Marloo set out to tackle. Their AI doesn’t promise to reinvent human intelligence or solve philosophy. It takes meeting transcripts, client calls, and raw documents, and turns them into compliant, ready-to-send advice reports. No more typing until midnight. No more copy-pasting templates.
It’s not flashy. But it gives financial advisers back one full day per week. That’s not a marginal gain. That’s twenty percent of your working life freed overnight.
This is what real AI looks like in business: boring, specific, and transformative.
Why Cognition AI matters in the same breath
On the other end of the spectrum, Cognition AI’s latest funding round put it at a $10.2B valuation. That’s a lot of zeros. Investors are betting heavily on its platform to reshape how software is developed.
At first glance, these two stories couldn’t be more different. One’s about shaving paperwork hours in financial advice. The other’s about reinventing enterprise software. But they’re really two sides of the same coin.
Both are about workflows.
Marloo fixes the workflow of financial advisers. Cognition AI promises to fix the workflow of software teams. And that’s where the real value of AI is - not in theory, not in hype, not in generic chatbots, but in making work flow faster, cleaner, and more reliably.
The trap most businesses fall into
Here’s where most companies get it wrong: they chase the shiny demos. They see AI writing poetry or generating pictures and think: “We need to be doing that too.”
So they add an AI plugin to their CRM. Or they buy licenses for a chatbot nobody uses. Or they pay consultants to draft an “AI strategy” that looks good on PowerPoint but never gets adopted.
The result? Zero ROI. According to MIT research, 95% of companies report no measurable return from their AI projects. That’s not because AI doesn’t work. It’s because leaders are solving the wrong problems.
AI isn’t meant to impress you. It’s meant to save you time, money, and headaches.
That’s why Marloo’s raise matters. It shows investors are willing to back workflow-first AI, even in a niche like financial advice. It’s why Cognition AI’s valuation matters too: because they’re betting on AI as the engine of enterprise productivity, not just another toy.
The operator’s rule: prove it, then scale it
If you’re a business owner, here’s the sequence that works:
Find the pain. What’s the one task your team hates but has to do every day? That’s your target.
Automate with context. Don’t bolt on some generic chatbot. Deploy an AI agent inside the tools you already use, with your data, your workflows, and your rules.
Measure hard. If the system doesn’t save hours or reduce errors, it’s not worth scaling. Kill it fast.
Scale only after proof. Once you know it works in one workflow, expand it into others.
That’s how adoption sticks. That’s how ROI shows up in weeks, not years.
Governance and guardrails? Important. But they come after the proof. If you try to build rules before results, you’ll spend a fortune governing a system that doesn’t even work.
What business leaders should learn from Marloo
Let’s break down why Marloo’s raise is a blueprint for practical AI adoption.
It’s domain-specific. They didn’t try to build an “AI for everything.” They picked financial advice paperwork - a high-pain, high-frequency workflow - and nailed it.
It’s ROI-clear. Advisers save a day a week. That’s not soft ROI like “better insights.” That’s time you can invoice, time you can spend with clients, time you can use to grow.
It’s workflow-integrated. The system works with how advisers already operate, not in a separate silo. That’s why adoption is high.
If you’re in any industry - finance, healthcare, retail, logistics - the lesson is the same. Don’t try to be general. Find your pain point. Solve it. Build trust with your team.
What investors see in Cognition AI
Cognition’s story is bigger in scale but built on the same logic. Software teams are drowning in inefficiency. Writing, testing, and deploying code is expensive and slow. If AI can cut development cycles in half, it’s worth billions.
Investors aren’t stupid. They’re not throwing $400M at Cognition for hype. They’re betting on real adoption, real demand, and real impact. And while the headlines are about valuation, the underlying story is the same as Marloo’s: AI that fixes workflow pain gets traction.
Why most AI projects still fail
If 95% of companies see no ROI, it’s because they make three classic mistakes:
They chase hype, not pain. Buying tools because competitors do, not because they fix anything.
They ignore context. Plugging in AI without connecting it to existing systems and data.
They over-govern. Writing rulebooks before testing anything useful, smothering innovation before it starts.
The companies that break this pattern are the ones that treat AI like any other business system. They start small, they prove value, they scale slowly, and they keep humans in charge of what matters.
How Intellisite builds differently
At Intellisite.co, we don’t sell shiny toys. We design agentic AI systems that fit your business the way a tailored suit fits better than something off the rack.
That means:
Mapping your workflows before we automate a thing.
Embedding AI into the systems your team already uses - CRMs, ops platforms, communications tools.
Measuring ROI in terms that matter: hours saved, revenue gained, errors reduced.
Scaling governance after results are proven, so adoption grows instead of stalling.
It’s not glamorous. But it works.
The bottom line
Two stories. One lesson.
Marloo raised $4.6M by cutting out the admin tax on financial advisers. Cognition AI hit $10B by promising to cut inefficiency out of software development. Different industries, same logic: AI that solves real workflow pain is the only AI that scales.
So if you’re a business leader, ask yourself:
Where is my team wasting the most time?
What’s the repetitive task everyone hates?
How could an AI agent fit into my existing system to fix that pain?
Stop worrying about keeping up with the hype cycle. Stop drafting 50-page AI policies. Start small. Prove ROI. Scale what works. Then govern it.
That’s how you avoid becoming part of the 95%.
At Intellisite, we build AI that works for your business - not against it. Visit www.intellisite.co to see how agentic AI systems can help you save time, protect value, and finally make automation pay off.