The Contrarian Partner: How Illumia's CTO Uses AI to Think Better, Not Just Faster
August 20, 2026For most of his career, Taran Lent, Chief Technology Officer at Illumia, had an edge; he could write. He had a gift for structuring complex ideas and making them land.
Then AI arrived, and it felt like everyone could do that now. Taran reflected:
"I felt like my superpower had been neutralized. Suddenly AI, everybody can now generate a lot of content."
But something unexpected happened. As Taran started using AI in his own writing process, he discovered it wasn't making him faster. It was making him better:
"I'm using AI as a contrarian partner. 'Hey, what are all the things I'm not thinking about? Rate this on a scale of 1 to 10. How could I make this a 10? What could I be wrong about?"
By the time he reviews the output, iterates on it, and puts it into his own voice, the time investment is roughly the same. But the quality of what he publishes is measurably higher. The shift isn't about speed: it's about completeness, rigor, and the willingness to pressure-test your own thinking before sharing it.
That philosophy, AI as a critical thought partner rather than an automation shortcut, now runs through everything Illumia is building internally. Taran joined host Douglas Ferguson on a recent episode of the New Friction podcast to talk through how Illumia got there, and what they've learned along the way.
From behind the curve to enterprise-wide
About two years ago, Taran would have said Illumia was behind. The company had been through a major transaction: Roper Technologies acquired CBORD and merged it with Transact to form Illumia. Navigating that process consumed enormous organizational capacity, and AI adoption took a back seat. He shared the epiphany:
"We woke up one day and said, 'We're not where we want to be.’"
The response was deliberate. Illumia created an AI enablement task force, a group of about 40 to 50 people whose mandate was explicitly not to govern or gatekeep. The naming mattered:
"We didn't want it to be a governing board. We didn't want it to be a central bottleneck. We said, 'Let's create greenhouse conditions where people can start to play, learn, experiment, apply, and then share with each other what's working and what's not.’"
The task force focused on eliminating friction for individual adoption: clarifying which tools were approved, speeding up the review process for new software requests, and securing enterprise licenses with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft Copilot. The goal for that first year was simple: get everybody in the game.
This year, the mandate has shifted. Individual AI use is table stakes. The new challenge is elevating it to team and enterprise level. Taran elaborated:
"It's not good enough to be using AI at a personal level anymore. If it's really providing value, how do you bottle that up and make it available to the whole team?"
Finding the high-toil work
The strategic frame Taran returns to most often is deceptively simple: look for high-toil, low-joy work. He explains:
"Anytime you free up capacity so people can work on other things or more strategic work or more fulfilling work, those use cases just build momentum. Success is contagious and success is kind of compounding."
At Illumia, this principle translated into an internal initiative called "Identify the Drag." Employees flag meetings, processes, and workflows that slow them down. Leadership prioritizes and eliminates them, one by one. Even modest gains, five to 10 hours per person per week, aggregate into significant organizational capacity.
The same logic applies to Illumia's clients: hospitals, universities, and healthcare systems all operating under tighter budgets and growing demand. When Illumia can automate a tedious process or surface insights that used to require hours of manual analysis, it gives those institutions more room to create the experiences that drive the best outcomes for students, patients, and the communities they serve.
Where the real gains are hiding
Taran's engineering teams have moved quickly. Two years ago, fewer than 20% of the code Illumia produced was AI-assisted. Today, that number is 90 to 95%. On modern tech stacks, the team is seeing 20 to 30% throughput gains.
But Taran's bigger bet isn't just on engineering productivity. It's on product discovery.
"On the upfront product discovery, validation, research, prototyping with clients, I think that's going to be where we see extraordinary leverage and gains."
Product managers used to rely on surveys, advisory boards, and structured feedback sessions. Now they can run client conversations through AI, extract patterns, identify emerging needs, and prototype faster than ever. The feedback loop that once took months can now close in days. Taran shared:
"Innovation a lot of the time is about seeing patterns that other people don't see. AI can absolutely help you look around the corner if you have enough data with enough signals."
The parts AI can't replace
For all his enthusiasm about what AI can do, Taran is equally clear about responsibility, and about what it can't. AI is probabilistic, trained on what has already happened. That makes it well-suited to recognizing patterns but limited when it comes to forging something genuinely new:
"There's still a lot of room for humans to use their creativity and the power of our minds to forge things that have never happened before."
His answer to the question of what humans bring to the table: judgment, creativity, and resourcefulness. As AI handles more of the high-toil work, those distinctly human capabilities become more valuable, not less.
His advice to anyone navigating this moment: experiment, play, learn, share. And if you're in a leadership role, bring genuine passion and be deliberate about the culture you're creating around it. On this, Taran stated:
"None of us really know where this is all going and that's okay. Be a force for good. Help steer this in the right direction. Be engaged and be active."
At Illumia, that culture is already in motion. From the enablement task force to "Identify the Drag" to a rigorous but streamlined tool approval process, the company is building the infrastructure for AI to compound. Not just inside their own walls, but deepening Illumia's role as a trusted technology partner to every campus and healthcare environment it serves.
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Listen to the full podcast episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!
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