Dan Zitting Spent a Week in the Dark with AI. Then He Made It Nitrogen's Superpower.

Welcome to Episode 2 of Beyond the Meeting — Contio’s podcast about what happens after the room clears, where what gets said turns into what gets done.

When generative AI showed up, Dan Zitting didn’t send a memo. He went first.

Dan is the CEO of Nitrogen, the software financial advisors use to put the Risk Number in front of their clients. His engineers had been living through the disruption first, for the better part of nine months, and everyone else in the company was waiting to see what it meant for them. So Dan drew a line: guess who else’s job is going to go through this? Everyone’s. Better to get on board now and find the value than get cornered later.

Then he sat with the tools for a week in the dark until he was running his own day on them. He came back with an internal maturity model, levels and all, and a pitch to the team: “If I can be on level four and I’m an idiot, the rest of you definitely can.”

Nine months of a scary thing turned into something people wanted to try. His word for it is a superpower.

This is also the one episode where the host is compromised. Aaron founded Nitrogen as Riskalyze, ran it for twelve and a half years, handed Dan the keys, and has sat on his board ever since. Some of what Dan critiques, Aaron built. He does critique it. Cheerfully. And he’s right.

Dan’s path to the seat is worth knowing. He was an auditor who watched a material financial misstatement get past his own team. He left to start a small audit firm, couldn’t afford the $20,000 server software everyone else ran, and built his own instead. That became workpapers.com, which was acquired by ACL, later rebranded as Galvanize. He spent the next decade there, ended up running it, and then took over Nitrogen.

What we cover

• Go first, quietly, then show your work. Dan didn’t mandate AI. He used it for a week until it ran his own day, then went back to the company and said: here’s how I’m using it, here’s what I learned, here’s where I looked dumb. Mandates don’t move people. Modeling does.
• “Guess who else’s job is going to go through it? Everyone’s.” Software engineers got disrupted first. Dan’s read is that it’s a preview, not an exception. The choice isn’t whether your job changes. It’s whether you get ahead of it or get cornered by it.
• Minutes in product is going away. Nitrogen used to count time spent in the app as a win. Now the goal is to get advisors out faster: AI fills the forms, connects the dots between risk, income, and taxes, and what’s left is the part that should be seen, the conversation with the client.
• The baseline skill of this era is coaching. Even if you’re coaching agents instead of people. The tools don’t do it on their own. Aaron’s addition: a large language model is built to find the average next token, so if you’re waiting for it to hand you a strategy, you’ll get an average one. Great businesses aren’t built on average strategies.
• Early looked exactly like wrong. Aaron rebranded Riskalyze to Nitrogen a few months before handing Dan the keys, and Dan tells him on tape that they did it too soon: “We rebranded when we knew we wanted to be something more in the market, but we weren’t quite yet.” For a couple of years, about a third of their net promoter responses asked why the name changed. Then a new product story landed and the question went to zero. Aaron’s takeaway, eating it himself: we weren’t wrong about the name. We were early. And for about two years, early looked exactly like wrong.
• Why the audit missed it. Early in his career, Dan’s team traced one phone call through a client’s entire billing system and called the control proven. It worked for that one call. Across millions of others, the company was overbilling its customers. The lesson he still carries: check whether you’re serving the methodology or the actual objective.

In his words

As a CEO, it was my job first to live into that. Just sit there with the tools for a week in the dark until I’m running my day with them. Then go back to the company and say, here’s how I’m using them, here’s what I’ve learned. And if I can be on level four and I’m an idiot, the rest of you definitely can.

Try this in your next meeting

Before you ask your team to adopt anything, spend a week doing it yourself in the dark. Then show them your notes, including the parts where you looked dumb.

One more thing

Dan went home to his small town in Colorado this summer and finally got his dad to sit down and run through Nitrogen with him. A brokerage statement, a tax return, a questionnaire. Fifteen minutes, start to finish, and out came the full picture: the Risk Number, the portfolio, the tax insights, and the advice that he was overrisked and needed to fix it slowly or pay a lot in tax.

Dan says it was the closest thing his dad has ever had to a real financial planning conversation.

That’s the whole argument, and it’s the one Aaron keeps coming back to at Contio: take the rote work out so the human part can happen. The software did the fifteen minutes. The conversation was the point.

About Dan Zitting

Dan Zitting is the CEO of Nitrogen, the connected suite of AI advisor software financial advisors use to put the Risk Number in front of their clients. Before Nitrogen, he founded workpapers.com and went on to lead Galvanize through its acquisition. He started his career as an auditor.

About Beyond the Meeting

Beyond the Meeting is Contio’s podcast about how leaders actually lead, build, and get real work done. Hosted by Contio CEO Aaron Klein, who spent twelve and a half years building Riskalyze — now Nitrogen — for financial advisors before founding Contio. New episodes every three weeks.

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