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The race for the next big technology innovation is tight—we live in an era of tech entrepreneurs. As a result, staying relevant or even keeping up with the tech industry drumbeat is a grueling task, but not for AI’s quiet veteran Colin Wiel. He stands apart with an enduring commitment to innovation. As co-founder and CEO of Qurrent, Wiel is bringing his vast experience to usher in a transformative era of autonomous AI agents.
But before he conceptualized Qurrent, Wiel’s journey with AI began at Boeing in the 90s. His work on automatic control systems marked a quiet yet pivotal shift in technology. “A pretty significant problem that the organization was struggling with was that airplanes would sometimes veer off the end of an icy runway, which of course is a safety hazard,” Wiel recalls. His solution? An AI-enhanced braking system moved the braking efficiency from 92% to 97%, which meant a 5% shorter stopping distance, a material difference.
“It was a big success. I suddenly had a little celebrity cachet at Boeing,” Wiel shares. This innovation led to him being placed on Boeing’s AI Steering Committee. “I was 10 years younger than the next youngest person on the committee. That was my whole world for my first four years out of college, being deeply immersed in AI. I was 22 when I started.”
“This experience kickstarted my admiration for AI and all that it can do for us,” he continues. His quiet impact at Boeing laid the foundation for a career marked by innovation — evident with his company Waypoint Homes.
“I co-founded this company in 2009 {after the foreclosure crisis} to scale single-family rental ownership. Nobody had ever owned more than a thousand single-family rentals before this. My co-founder and I started this company together—he had real estate experience and I was the tech guy. We built an AI and data platform for analyzing and figuring out the best homes to buy that would perform well as long-term rental properties,” Wiel discusses. The AI platform looked at granular neighborhood-level data such as school quality and crime levels, across 10 major markets to determine the worth of the rentals.
“An important part of it was an AI model that could predict how much a given house would rent for. It had a high degree of accuracy. And that was at the crux of how we scaled this company, ultimately buying over 17,000 houses one at a time and assembling them in a portfolio.” Wiel and his co-founder went public on the New York Stock Exchange and rang the opening bell—It was a billion-dollar exit.
Fast forward to 2023, Wiel co-founded Qurrent which develops custom-built autonomous AI agent systems tailored to the specific workflows for companies in a wide range of industries. “These are basically AI workers. Think of it like an AI workforce, and these employees do the things that human employees historically have done at these companies, but more quickly and efficiently.”
Rooted in his decades of experience as a quiet veteran for AI innovation, Wiel played a key role in developing Qurrent’s AI Operating System alongside Co-founder and CTO August Rosedale. The first version of the Operating System was built specifically for software development and was successful at performing complex tasks, but Wiel and Rosedale quickly realized if AI agents can perform software development, they can also handle most other cognitive tasks.
“That’s when we started to see that AI agents had the potential to radically transform business,” says Wiel. This led to facilitating the creation of agent systems of all types, and today, Wiel believes that autonomous AI agents are on the brink of one of the largest technological paradigm shifts in history, and “we’re just at the very beginning of it.”
“We’re entering an era in which employees will work hand-in-hand with autonomous AI agents that make decisions, perform high-level tasks, and execute workflows at unprecedented speeds. Our technology is positioned at the forefront of these innovations, enabling businesses to benefit from powerful, custom-built AI solutions,” the website states.
“I always saw AI for what it was and still is: a major opportunity,” Wiel says.
AI agents have the potential to manage entire workflows, oversee operations, and pull in humans when appropriate, overall creating a leaner organizational structure. “People are going to be elevated to focus more on strategic and creative thinking,” he discusses. Of course, to be successful, Wiel understands that these newer AI agents will need to learn and understand how to coincide with existing tech systems. “The key is to create a symbiotic relationship between every piece of tech and AI within the organization,” Wiel explains. This can be done by human interference in training the AI agents, as well as an emphasized focus on strategic data collection.
Just as Wiel has been AI’s quiet veteran for decades, creating groundbreaking, innovative technology for companies as prominent as Boeing and Waypoint Homes, his autonomous AI agents are a reflection of his experience: quiet disruptors with the biggest impact.
The possibilities are exponential for employers, employees, and even consumers. Employees can lean on agents to handle tedious tasks to allow them to upskill at a faster rate, employers can create more sensible and efficient organizational operations, and consumer prices could potentially decline as a result of AI agents taking the load off of mundane tasks that human employees are burdened with — not to replace human efforts but to complement one another.
“We’re at the beginning of this radical shift that’s about to happen,” Wiel concludes. He understands the larger picture of how Qurrent’s innovations can provoke positive change in our society, and with a belief that every company should move at the speed of AI, he’s on the continuum of innovation, and Qurrent’s impact has only just begun.
To learn more about Colin Wiel, visit his LinkedIn here, or explore Qurrent’s website here.
