The Mindset way / Build your difference, not your plumbing

Introduction

Barrie Hadfield, CEO & Co-founder Last updated October 3, 2026

Why software companies putting AI agents in front of their customers should spend their developers on what makes them different, not on the machinery underneath.

I am a co-founder and the chief executive of Mindset AI, so read what follows in that light. But I firmly believe that the way most teams are building agents today is wrong.

By agents I mean AI assistants built into a software product that understand a request and act on it for the user: answering a question from the customer's own data, filling in a form, running a report. Most software companies have now promised their customers something like this.

Early websites were built from the ground up, payment systems and all. As the web matured, companies stopped building that machinery themselves. They bought it from specialists and spent their own effort on what made their site different.

The same thing is happening with AI agents. Companies still building all of the machinery underneath their agents are spending their time on the wrong thing: work that is identical to all companies, that no customer will ever see and is not the reason someone buys from you.

Mindset is a platform that carries that machinery, so a whole team, not just its developers, can build agents into its software. Our customers are all software companies, and they keep all of their own intellectual property, and spend their time building more of it.