Matrix42 Cortex · Aug 2025 – Apr 2026

Cortex: the standalone that became the company's AI

Three people, outside the release train, built an agentic AI app for the service desk: chat that acts, autonomous resolution, root cause, routing, workflows, on web, desktop and Teams. In September 2026 it became Neo, the AI layer of the whole portfolio.

Role: Product, design and frontend, founding team of three
Period: Aug 2025 – Apr 2026, then integrated
Stack: React 19TypeScriptViteTailwind 4ElectronTeams botFastAPIPythonPostgresLangfuse

my commits, #1 contributor
of commits from the founding team of three
use cases in production by April
users by April

The Innovation Studio was founded in July 2025 with a team of three. By November we were on regular calls with internal early adopters, the company's own IT service desk first among them; from January the same rhythm ran with customers, twice a week, each call feeding the next release. By April the standalone had 150+ users, hundreds of interactions a day and six use cases in production: conversational intelligence, autonomous resolution, root-cause analysis, knowledge management, ticket routing and workflows. Activation was self-service in under five minutes, with no professional services.

What I built

The web app: chat, custom agents, ticket workbench with investigation summary, recommendations, automation score and activity timeline, canvas tools, eight languages.
Electron desktop with a notch-style quick chat; voice experiments with real-time models; the Teams bot's commercial approvals design.
A generative UI spec: a render_ui tool so an agent can answer with a form, a table or a card instead of prose.
Studio, the admin side: agents, decisions, activity, cost, posture, policies, register. The clarity pass decided 149 findings into sixteen rules.
Two marketing sites with WebGL hero animations and eight locales, the early-adopter program playbook, and the demos for the board, Gartner and the partner conference.

Cortex Studio home with decisions waiting for a human — Studio home: what needs you first. Decisions wait for a person; agents never approve themselves.

An agent's overview: schedule, budget warning, latest runs, what it watches — An agent: what it watches, how it ran, what it costs, in plain words.

Cost page: spend against budget, per week, by agent — Cost: where the money went, against the autopilot budget.

Decisions queue — Decisions: every write an agent wants, with a deadline and a diff.

What it became

In September 2026 the company announced Neo as the AI across the whole portfolio, powered by this platform. The standalone's chat became the assistant inside the service desk, the self-service portal and Teams; the workflow engine, the knowledge graph and the tool layer carried over. The earlier Matrix42 Intelligence features, built by larger teams over the previous two years, were superseded.

Neo beside an incident: live checks, root cause, remediation plan — Neo beside a ticket: live device checks, the cause, one approval.

Neo in Microsoft Teams placing an order with approvals — Neo in Teams: an order through conversation, each write approved.