AI should feel like a capable teammate.

Vivigent came from a frustration with the way AI agents were being introduced into the workplace.

As AI agents became more capable, it was clear they could do more than answer questions or generate content. They could research, summarize, organize, prepare, enrich, compare, and execute repeatable business tasks. But the way most companies were being asked to adopt AI felt incomplete.

Employees were being given chatbots and expected to figure out how to make them useful. Businesses were being asked to send sensitive data into frontier models without always having full control over where that data went or how it might be used. And the promise of AI productivity was often buried behind a new interface, a new habit, and a new layer of uncertainty.

I wanted to approach the problem differently.

Instead of asking people to adapt their work around AI, I wanted AI to adapt around the way people already work.

That became the foundation for Felix, Vivigent’s first agentic appliance. Felix is designed as a role-based digital coworker that operates inside existing business tools, follows structured playbooks, and works with the company’s own context. It is not meant to be another general-purpose chatbot. It is meant to be a practical coworker for specific business functions.

The other part of the idea was control. Many companies want the benefit of AI, but they do not want to casually expose their business data to systems they do not control. They need a way to bring AI into the organization without giving up ownership of their information, their workflows, or their operating model. That is why Vivigent focuses on local, on-premise deployment.

Companies don’t need or want an AI Agent. What they need is a resource that they can work with as they do anyone else and that can take on meaningful responsibilities and not just be available for chat.

The belief behind Vivigent is simple: for many business workflows, the best AI solution is not always the largest model available. It is the right model, running in the right environment, with the right business context, performing the right task in a predictable way.

Felix was created to help companies move beyond experimentation and into useful, governed AI adoption. It gives teams a way to apply AI to real work without forcing broad behavior change, without exposing more data than necessary, and without turning every employee into a prompt engineer.

Vivigent exists because AI should feel less like another tool to manage and more like a capable teammate that understands the job, respects the rules, and helps the business move faster.

Todd Michaud