The Perplexity Business Fellowship Program

Why this fellowship mattered

When Perplexity launched the Business Fellowship I was looking for a forcing function to pressure-test my approach to AI strategy inside CELO. The fellowship delivered exactly that: a condensed sprint with founders, operators, and AI leaders from Replit, Box, and Nvidia who openly shared the systems, guardrails, and incentives they use to make AI adoption stick.

What I learned from the operators

1. Replit showed how to design internal assistants as products, not prototypes. Their emphasis on telemetry-driven prompt iteration now shapes how I review CELO's agent workflows each Friday.
2. Box highlighted governance. Their layered access model inspired the role-based guardrails I later deployed so CELO teams can safely co-pilot with Perplexity.
3. Nvidia reinforced the importance of platform thinking. Their playbook for pairing GPUs with curated knowledge bases validated my push to centralize CELO's tribal knowledge before scaling assistants.

Translating it into CELO's AI stack

• Perplexity as the primary assistant: I operationalized Perplexity inside CELO as our shared research and ops guide. Every team now has a default “Ask Perplexity first” ritual backed by custom instructions aligned with CELO vocabulary and decision criteria.
• Journey-first documentation: Each experiment with Perplexity feeds into our AI journey repository, so lessons become searchable institutional memory rather than siloed wins.
• Leadership cadence: Weekly AI leadership standups now start with a Perplexity briefing that summarizes current blockers and highlights new industry tactics, keeping executives grounded in real data.

Outcome: stepping fully into AI leadership

This fellowship shifted me from caretaker of AI initiatives to owner of CELO's transformation. Listening to current AI leaders, experimenting live with Perplexity, and immediately integrating those insights into CELO's workflows created a loop: learn, implement, document, share. That loop is now the standard I use to guide every new AI capability we roll out.