Erkang Zheng has spent decades thinking about what breaks inside organizations. First, as a cybersecurity founder. The problem there was visibility. Companies couldn't see their own digital infrastructure clearly enough to protect it. Now, as the founder of Ariso, where the problem is something older and harder: the gap between what a company intends and what actually happens.
"The bottleneck is no longer in technical ability," he said when we talked. "The bottleneck is in organizations. The real opportunity is to turn every employee into a leader, a player‑coach at scale."
That's a specific and considered claim from someone who's earned the standing to make it. Erkang founded JupiterOne, a cloud-native security platform that became a billion-dollar company out of the Triangle. He's now building Ariso, whose core product is Ari. She's an AI partner that lives inside your workday, not as a tool you open when you need something, but as a continuous presence that knows your priorities, tracks your commitments, preps you for meetings, and catches what you miss.
The phishing story is worth telling. Erkang forwarded an email to his team without realizing it was a scam. Ari caught it. She flagged the suspicious sender and payment link and reached out before anyone paid anything. Erkang, a cybersecurity veteran who has built security companies, missed it because he was moving fast. Ari wasn't.
"It's not just about doing work for you," he said. "It's about having the situational awareness to look out for you."
That's the product philosophy in a single sentence. And it's a meaningful departure from how most AI tools are positioned right now.
Erkang's read on the current AI moment is more measured than the hype cycle tends to allow. He draws a clear line between what's real and what's still being oversold. General intelligence replacing humans? Not yet, and probably not soon. But AI configured correctly, built into the actual fabric of how you work rather than bolted on as a feature? That's already happening, and the gap between people doing it well and people who aren't is widening fast.
The mindset shift he keeps coming back to is this: stop treating AI like a screwdriver. A screwdriver always works the same way. AI doesn't. It works better when you work with it, when you give it context, when you treat it less like a search engine and more like a collaborator who needs to understand your situation to actually help you. When AI becomes an operating partner instead of a glorified search box, it can help transform your team and how you run your business.
His point is simple: even 80% accuracy from an AI partner still saves you 80% of your time. "That's the win," he said.
He'll be at All Things AI in Durham later this month. For anyone building in the organizational AI space, or trying to understand where the real frontier is right now, Erkang is exactly the kind of person worth getting in a room with.
Erkang is also featured in during the Raleigh-Durham Startup Week founder spotlight series. RDSW runs April 20–24 across Raleigh and Durham.