The New Category Becoming

The New Category

the Standard

Becoming the Standard

Worki didnt come from a pitch deckit formed over years, piece by piece, until it became a company in 2025.

Eight Ideas. Eight Places. One Thesis.

Eight Ideas. Eight Places. One Thesis.

The New Category

The enterprise AI conversation has split into two camps: dystopia, where machines replace workers, or utopia, where one platform solves everything. Craig Allan Ahrens rejects both. Both miss the actual problem.
The actual problem is the lack of connectivity between existing infrastructure — visibility gaps that prevent organizations from unifying data and identifying clear pathways for roles to be amplified. Healthcare alone burns over two trillion dollars annually in administrative overhead — duplicated credentialing, fragmented scheduling, career development that exists only on paper, and dozens of disconnected platforms that store data but cannot act on it. Every health system maintains this isolation independently. The cost compounds. The inefficiency compounds.

Craig witnessed this firsthand early in his career. The pattern never changed: fragmented systems, no unified workforce view, and millions spent because the connective infrastructure to activate the people already inside the building had never been built.
This book declares a different path. Rather than replacing broken systems, you join them with gold — AI workforce operational infrastructure that unifies existing infrastructure. The Kintsugi Framework lays out shared, compounding architecture built on five principles: See, Prepare, Apply, Compound, Declare. A crosswalk creating interoperability without replacing systems. Capability maps transforming job descriptions into declarations of human potential. Amplifiers multiplying what workforce professionals can do. And an Infrasharing model — modeled on Visa’s shared payment platform for banks — making every institution that joins smarter, stronger, and less expensive to operate.

The human leads. The agents amplify. The infrastructure compounds.

Available now for free preview of pre-first edition and available on Amazon mid-March.
ISBN: 979-8-9951784-0-8

Founding Team

Built at the intersection of healthcare operations & enterprise AI

a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk
a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk

Craig Allan Ahrens

CEO

MHA/MBA, Saint Louis; Executive Education, Wharton. Former healthcare operations leader who developed the thesis for health system workforce marketplaces (“Uber for Nursing”) and scaled it at a Y Combinator company, then built marketplace infrastructure to apply to internal float pools and engagement tech including education subsidy incentives, flexible staff ride benefits, and AI-driven shift cascading across internal and external labor.

MHA/MBA, Saint Louis; Executive Education, Wharton. Former healthcare operations leader who developed the thesis for health system workforce marketplaces (“Uber for Nursing”) and scaled it at a Y Combinator company, then built marketplace infrastructure to apply to internal float pools and engagement tech including education subsidy incentives, flexible staff ride benefits, and AI-driven shift cascading across internal and external labor.

Used that experience to develop the thesis for a new category: AI Workforce Operational Infrastructure. Author of The New Category – the book that declares the category and the Kintsugi Framework.

Used that experience to develop the thesis for a new category: AI Workforce Operational Infrastructure. Author of The New Category – the book that declares the category and the Kintsugi Framework.

a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk
a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk
a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk

Harvey Hongwei Li, PhD

Harvey Hongwei Li

CTO

Founding AI/ML engineering team at both Uber and Airbnb. Built and scaled the machine learning infrastructure that powered core platform intelligence at both companies during their highest-growth phases. PhD from UC Berkeley.

Building the technology for a new category: Workforce Unifying Infrastructure. The AI-native platform that fills the cracks between systems and turns fragmented data into unified intelligence.

a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk
a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk
a man with his arms crossed standing in front of a desk

Michael Biggs

CCO

33 years of healthcare operational consulting and turnaround leadership. Practice leader and senior managing director across FTI Consulting, Navigant, ECG Management Consultants, and Arthur Andersen. Over $3 billion in documented operational expense reductions across health systems nationwide.

Drives commercial execution, pipeline development, and the go-to-market motion that converts health system relationships into signed contracts and active coalition members.

Expanding in healthcare and other complex industries.

Expanding in healthcare and other complex industries.