Dan Zitting Spent a Week in the Dark with AI. Then He Made It Nitrogen's Superpower.
Dan Zitting explains how going first turned generative AI from a threat into Nitrogen’s operating advantage, why coaching matters more than mandates, and why the Riskalyze-to-Nitrogen rebrand arrived before the product story was ready.
Generative AI first disrupted Nitrogen’s engineering team. Nine months later, much of the company was still waiting to learn what it meant for them. CEO Dan Zitting decided the way through was to go first.
He spent a week with the tools until they were running his day. Then he returned with an internal maturity model, showed his team what he had learned, and turned a threat into something people wanted to use.
What we cover
- Why modeling AI adoption moved people more effectively than a mandate.
- Why software engineers experienced the disruption first—and why Dan believes every job will go through it.
- How AI changes Nitrogen’s product goal from keeping advisors in the software to getting them back to client conversations faster.
- Why coaching has become a baseline skill, even when the person being coached is an AI agent.
- Why the Riskalyze-to-Nitrogen rebrand arrived before the product story was ready, and why early looked exactly like wrong for two years.
- What a missed financial misstatement taught Dan about serving the real objective instead of the methodology.
Go first, then show your work
Dan did not begin with an AI mandate. He used the tools himself, found the value, and came back with evidence—including the parts where he looked dumb. His team could see a path because their CEO had already walked it.
Early can look wrong
Riskalyze became Nitrogen before the company could fully explain what the new name meant. For two years, roughly a third of its net promoter survey responses asked why the name had changed. When the broader product story finally landed, the question disappeared.
The name was not wrong. The timing was early enough to make it look wrong.
The conversation is the point
Dan tested Nitrogen with his father using a brokerage statement, a tax return, and a questionnaire. Fifteen minutes later, the software had connected risk, investments, taxes, and advice into one picture—and made room for the financial planning conversation his father had never really had.
The software did the fifteen minutes. The conversation was the point.