Key Takeaways

• We held our first Innovation Summit in Montevideo this month: two days for a remote-first team to meet in person and align on goals, priorities, and actions for the rest of the year.

• T.R.U.S.S. Compass, our AI compliance tool, and Sokuvo, our context orchestration system, led the two-day agenda.

• Diving deep into R&D’s services: Open Lab, Emergency Button, and the Arionkoder Academy. 

  
  
  

My plane from Buenos Aires took off early in the morning. By the time we arrived, our teammates from Canada, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and, for sure, Uruguay were already at the office in Montevideo with some alfajores, mate, and Brazilian sweets. If you work remotely as well, you know by now that meeting the people you usually see in calls or as avatars on Slack really changes everything. And this was more than a typical meeting: it was our first Innovation Summit.

Since this was our first one, the team got together to align on common goals, priorities, and actions. I joined the Summit to bring that experience to you, the reader, the watcher, you name it. That mostly meant I spent two days with a recorder, catching people between sessions and asking them what they were building and why. This is a chronicle of what they told me.

Why a remote-first team gets in a room

Some of the people at the table had been working together for months without ever being in the same room. And, believe me, you could tell when they finally were: the hugs, the laughs, the talking. “We’re a remote-first team and being in the same space lets us cross-pollinate ideas. We need to closely discuss how to continue; it’s important for me, for the team, to share the ideas, share the creative space to continue innovating”, says Diego Franco, UX Designer at Arionkoder, while waiting for the next presentation to start.

The reason we were all there was clear. “I got to know everybody I had been working with for so long, and see their views and what they're doing in terms of the market. Even for the engineering part of the work, you have to reflect that”, adds Lucas Victorasso, AI Lead at Arionkoder. 

The Innovation Summit was structured around two days of hard work on alignment, covering all the products we’re building at Arionkoder and the future of AI. “Sokuvo (our context orchestration system) was born in a conversation like this one, and every time we get together it feels like we take a big leap in innovation”, says Abelardo Bandeira (Abe), AI Lead at Arionkoder, after finishing his presentation on Sokuvo.

With the agenda set, three main areas won the spotlight: T.R.U.S.S. Compass, Sokuvo, and Research and Development.

T.R.U.S.S. Compass: Staying compliant with the EU AI Act from the first line of code

The calendar on compliance and transparency obligations keeps moving. So did the sessions on T.R.U.S.S. Compass. T.R.U.S.S. Compass is our AI tool to help teams stay compliant from the first line of code. “T.R.U.S.S. Compass makes sure you’re compliant with the new regulations in place. It’s multilingual and multi-regulation, even though our focus right now is the EU AI Act”, explains Aisha Espino, AI-native Growth Solutions Lead, on her way to the go-to-market meeting.

“We’re helping AI product teams understand where they stand on the EU AI Act: what obligations apply to the system they’re building and what they need in place to bring it to market and turn that innovation into a product they can profit from”, adds Diego.

As you may know, compliance is on the agenda, and there’s a lot at stake if you don’t build it from the ground up: it’s 3–5x more expensive to retrofit compliance after launch. Compliance is a matter of the present and the future. That’s why the sessions covered what’s already happening and what’s coming next for this AI tool.

“I presented how T.R.U.S.S. Compass will evolve over the coming months: our plans for the end of the year and next year, and the challenges ahead in architecture and in the market. What I wanted from those sessions was everyone's point of view, so we could co-create instead of deciding in isolation”, says Isadora Monteiro, AI Product Manager at Arionkoder, about the importance of building together.

Sokuvo: The solution for the context bottleneck in AI-assisted delivery

Sokuvo is the other star of our Innovation Summit: it’s our context orchestration system that keeps intent, decisions, and implementation connected across the software delivery line. The result is engineering teams shipping faster without losing context. “Sokuvo helps developers ship code faster without the lack of context breaking things”, explains Aisha.

Writing code hasn’t been the issue lately (by lately I mean quite some time ago). What replaced it is everything around the code: the spec in one document, the decision made in a thread nobody can find, the reason one thing was built the way it was, living in the head of someone who has since moved to another project. I bet you can relate to that. Well, Sokuvo connects that chain from spec to plan to build to review to ship.

Abe, part of the Sokuvo team, presented the roadmap and the vision, and was honest about the hard part of his job: “One hard thing about product management is that you manage by influence, not hierarchy. You have to convey the message across roadmap, structure, design, engineering, and marketing, and get everyone building the right thing.”

After the demo of the second version for the whole team, which was impressive even for the non-technical (probably I was the only non-technical one in the room though), what struck me talking to Lucas was that he didn’t describe the product first. He described what it’s like to build it. “(At Arionkoder) You get a lot of freedom to pick your own tools and suggest ideas. You can suggest things, you can break things, and nobody is going to take it badly. Everyone around you is trying to do something great instead of waiting for requirements to arrive”, says Lucas. 

How R&D and scientific rigor become the core of innovation

Ignacio Orlando, our R&D Director, made time in his agenda for a conversation with us. He started by clarifying why Research and Development is essential: “R&D matters to our customers and us because of compounding IP. We take the learnings from research and development and move them into the innovation team, so we build tools we can reuse”.

• Open Lab: our applied research service, running structured experiments that establish whether an AI approach is feasible before an organization commits to building it.

• Emergency Button: our intervention service for AI systems that work in a demo and fail in production, or that are blocked; we provide a structured diagnosis of what’s really happening, targeted experiments that test the real hypotheses, and hands-on intervention to unblock delivery.

• The Arionkoder Academy: AI training programs that adapt to a team's existing workflows and needs, taking organizations from AI adoption to AI-native capability.

When I asked Ignacio what he expected from the two days, he gave me three main things. “I want to have more clarity about the new projects that we’re going to face from the second part of the year, how we’re going to help the other areas of innovation to push their products much better, and I want to eat an asado (Argentinian word for barbecue) with all the people”. All three were delivered on schedule.

What comes next

Our first Innovation Summit was focused on alignment. “This one was for everyone to leave with more clarity on what we need to do, what actions to take, and what we need to coordinate so we move faster. The next one should be more hands-on”, explains Damian Calderon, Innovation Lead, at Arionkoder.

The second Innovation Summit is coming in the next quarter. This was proof that getting rid of the ambiguity that slows one down is something to do in person with a coffee (or a mate) in hand. No Slack thread has ever been good at that (but wait, maybe Sokuvo will, who knows).