Giovanni Brees

Co-Founder at Marketing & Product Launches

New York, United States

Giovanni Brees is a founder, product strategist, author, and speaker with more than 25 years of experience bringing products to market.

His career began long before AI became part of every business conversation. He built agencies, worked on product launches for startups and established companies, and advised businesses entering new markets or looking for new ways to grow.

Over the years, Giovanni worked with small businesses, founders, global brands, and Fortune 500 companies. His work included projects involving Bain, Procter & Gamble, WordPress, and other international companies.

He also built a product validation and launch operation that helped take more than 4,500 products to market. The crowdfunding campaigns connected to that work raised more than 500 million USD and reached audiences in the hundreds of millions.

His projects and views have appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg, Forbes, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and Mashable.

After more than two decades of running teams and agencies, Giovanni decided he did not want to build another traditional company.

The problem was not a lack of opportunities. It was the way businesses were expected to grow. More clients meant more employees. More employees meant more meetings, more management, more overhead, and more time spent keeping the company running.

He began rebuilding his businesses around AI agents instead.

Today, Giovanni runs Meet Oscar and CiteEngine without full-time employees. The companies use AI systems for work that would normally be divided between sales, marketing, content, research, email, and operations teams.

Meet Oscar is an AI email assistant designed to understand incoming messages and prepare replies in the user's own voice.

CiteEngine works on how businesses and experts are discovered, referenced, and cited by AI search and answer engines.

Giovanni is also building KentoHQ, a system for creating and managing AI teammates inside a business. The idea is to move beyond isolated AI tools and build agents with defined roles, access to company knowledge, and clear limits on what they are allowed to do.

He describes this model as the zero-employee company.

It does not mean removing people from every decision. Giovanni still reviews important output, handles major relationships, and keeps control of legal, financial, and strategic decisions. The agents do much of the execution. The human remains responsible for the result.

That experience became the basis for his book, The Zero-Employee Company.

The book explains how founders can turn jobs into systems, divide work between specialised AI agents, connect those agents to company information, and add checks before anything reaches a customer or the public.

It also covers the parts that are often missing from discussions about AI automation: agents forgetting context, producing convincing but incorrect work, repeating mistakes, or taking actions they were never meant to take.

Giovanni is also the author of The Crowdfunding Quick Guide, first published in 2024 and updated in 2026. It draws on the campaigns, product launches, audience tests, and fundraising strategies behind more than half a billion dollars in crowdfunding revenue.

As a speaker and advisor, Giovanni works with founders and companies on AI agents, AI-first operations, product launches, crowdfunding, go-to-market strategy, product validation, and building businesses without large internal teams.

His work now sits at the meeting point of two areas he knows well: bringing products to market and designing companies that can operate with far less management and headcount.

Available For: Advising, Consulting
Travels From: New York