By Christine Graf
After spending more than a decade at the helm of Jolt Consulting Group, Jeff Oskin sold the IT consultancy firm in February 2022. By that time, his company had grown exponentially and had a staff of 50 employees.
“I grew that company both organically and through acquisitions,” he said. “We did IT consulting, specifically sales force implementation consulting work for service-oriented organizations.”
While operating Jolt, Oskin also began working as an executive coach, establishing a peer advisory group for executives in the Capital Region.
“Many of the most well-known executives in the Capital District are in that group,” said Oskin.
After selling Jolt Consultancy, he established Newlogiq, a business that provides cutting-edge AI consulting solutions to small and mid-sized businesses.
“I wanted to continue this entrepreneurial bent,” he said. “When I was contemplating my next move, I ultimately landed on going to market with a consulting company that sat at the intersection of three things: people, process, and technology.”
“From the people side, it’s helping organizations through executive coaching and leadership development—helping that next generation leader to develop skills to help them elevate their capabilities so as to improve the overall health of the company they work for.”
When referring to process, Oskin said he has long been a believer that technology should support business process.
“I believe AI—artificial intelligence—is a huge opportunity moving forward for organizations to leverage technology to simplify, automate, and streamline business processes.”
Oskin received his certification as an AI expert from Blockchain, a large non-profit that sets the standards for the blockchain industry.
“Blockchain itself is a type of technology, and Blockchain.org is a kind of a regulatory body from which AI has evolved,” he said.
Through his work at Newlogiq, Oskin helps companies streamline their processes through the use of AI and other technologies.
“Largely, my focus has been bringing AI capabilities to small and mid-size businesses in the region,” he said. “My goal is to ultimately build a center of excellence here in the Capital District area that businesses can rely on to help develop their talent and/or their process and technology infrastructure. I think this is something that is sorely lacking in our region.”
Oskin is finalizing negotiations to lease a facility in Clifton Park. It is there that he plans to establish his corporate center.
He continues to operate peer advisory groups and plans to launch five leadership groups in the new year. Oskin also offers executive coaching to individuals.
On the AI side of his consultancy, he offers corporate educational workshops. He has been busy presenting these workshops to companies throughout the Capital Region.
“I educate organizations on what is possible,” he said. “We also help organizations identify and ultimately implement AI applications specific to their business.
Newlogiq also works with companies through a retainer-based model.
“We can work in-house as an extension of their team by leading projects or doing whatever it is that they might need assistance with,” said Oskin.
He acknowledged that many people are leery of or even afraid of utilizing AI in their businesses.
“People who are scared are scared because they don’t understand it, so part of my effort is to educate people on what AI is and how it works. Once you demystify how it works, people become inherently much more comfortable with it.”
“I then launch into showing about 20 different applications that are used throughout different aspects of business—from marketing to HR to operations to customer service. I show them the possibilities that are out there.”
One of these applications is Jasper AI, an application used to help companies write marketing material.
“Jasper is all about writing marketing content,” said Oskin. “It’s an application you pay for, and it can write anything you want from press releases to blog posts to Google ads to job postings.”
Although the use of Jasper and other AI application can result in cost savings for businesses, Oskin points to other benefits.
“There are huge opportunities for efficiency improvements in an organization—allowing people who are doing mundane, repetitive tasks to elevate their capability to provide more value to customers. There is also an opportunity to monetize AI services for revenue purposes. That’s really where the biggest opportunity for AI in the market is.”
For example, Oskin said that a car wash business could profit by harnessing customer data that they accumulated over time.
“If the company has years and years worth of data that is relevant to their customer base, they can build and incorporate a machine learning AI algorithm on top of that data to predict pattern of customers. They could sell that trend data to other car wash companies.”
Because AI is constantly evolving, Newlogiq continuously researches, tests, and refines its AI solutions. For more information, visit newlogiq.com.