About us

Operators, not advisors.

There is no shortage of people willing to advise you on AI. There are very few who have run the change inside a regulated business, been in front of the risk committee, and had to answer for the number afterwards. That is the work we do.

01 · Where we work

We know the regulated world, because it is the only one we work in

Lending, banking, insurance and legal. Not AI in general, and not a horizontal playbook applied to your logo.

That matters because the constraints are the whole problem. A build that works beautifully in a demo dies at model risk, at privacy review, at the vendor security questionnaire, or at the regulator's next examination. We know those doors and we know what has to be on the page before you knock on them.

  • Underwriting, credit, servicing, claims, intake, post-close review
  • Model risk, fair lending, privacy, records retention, third-party risk
  • The difference between what your policy manual says and what your team actually does
02 · Who we are

We have built and transformed businesses, not just advised them

Our people have founded and run AI-native companies, and have carried enterprise transformation inside large organisations. Both halves matter.

Zero to one teaches you how fast something real can be built. Fortune 500 teaches you why that speed dies on contact with a large institution: the approvals, the legacy systems, the politics of whose headcount is affected. We have worked at both ends and we do not romanticise either one.

  • Transformation work with Disney, Apple, Under Armour, Avon, Discount Tire and government departments
  • Two companies founded and run from zero to one, one of them acquired
  • Currently running an AI-native business, so none of this is theoretical
03 · What we cover

People, process and technology, and how those three connect

Most firms take one of the three. A consultancy redesigns the process. A vendor sells the technology. A trainer works on the people. Each hands you a piece and leaves the joins to you, which is exactly where AI programmes come apart.

We take the whole thing. Where the work should be redesigned, what the technology can actually do today, and whether your people are willing and able to work the new way. The connections between those are the job, not an afterthought.

  • People: capability, fear, incentives, who owns it after we leave
  • Process: what to redesign, what to leave alone, what number should move
  • Technology: what to build, what to buy, what to wait for
04 · How we work

Hands on the keyboard, every time

We do not run briefings. Every session we run has senior people building something real, with a coach beside them, on their own work.

It is a harder way to run a day and it is the only thing we have found that changes what an executive believes. People do not change their minds because of a slide. They change them when the thing works in their own hands, and when they watch it fail and understand why.

  • One coach or developer for every three or four people
  • Your sanctioned tools, your sanitised data, your environment
  • Everyone builds, including the host

Who leads it

The founder, and why it is set up this way.

Reuven Gorsht, founder of The Variable

Reuven Gorsht founded The Variable after two decades on both sides of the problem. He built and leads Deeded, Canada's leading digital home-closing platform, and before that founded MoveSnap, acquired in 2018. Earlier he spent more than fifteen years at SAP leading customer strategy, working with Fortune 500 companies through exactly the kind of transformation that AI is now forcing.

He is a Harvard Business School alumnus, writes on AI adoption and the future of work for around 10,000 readers, and speaks on it to executive audiences across North America.

He did not arrive at this from a consulting practice. He arrived at it from the inside.

Deeded put AI into a real, regulated business early, and the same thing happened there that he now sees at almost every client. The technology turned out to be the easy part. What decided whether anything stuck was whether people had built enough skill to use it well, and whether they were quietly afraid of what it meant for their own job. Adoption stalled wherever nobody had built the capability. It moved wherever someone had.

That gap is what the firm exists to close. Reuven and The Variable team have since trained and worked with thousands of people on AI adoption, from executive teams setting the direction to the people running the process every day.

Start here

Two ways to begin.

Find out where you actually stand. Free.

Five minutes of your time, ninety seconds each from three of your people. You get both sets of answers side by side, the widest gap between them, and one thing that will move the needle in the next thirty days.

Start the free assessment

Or talk it through

Bring the piece of work you would most like to fix. We will tell you whether a number would actually move, and we will say so plainly if it would not.

Book a call

Email

[email protected]

Writing

Insights

Based in

Toronto, working across North America