Keynote speaker · Author · Strategist
Esra Kucukciftci
Founder and CEO, Pricing Innovations · Author of Quantware
I help leaders build the commercial, organizational and operational architecture their firms need to govern intelligent systems, and prove what those systems are worth.
- Founder and CEO, Pricing Innovations
- Former product leader, Amazon and SAS
- Lecturer, University of Minnesota
- Author, Quantware (Ideapress, 2027)
The idea
The quantware era has already begun
Every technological era introduces its own value system that defines how value is created, delivered, and captured. AI is not software.
Intelligent systems generate value dynamically, yet every instrument of the modern firm was engineered for an era where humans carried the value-creating act through static products, contracts, org charts, and performance metrics. Quantware is a new system of value creation, and the book Quantware: The Post-Software & Post-Product Era in Business & Technology builds the commercial, organizational, and operational architectures required to govern it. The window in which these architectures are still design choices is open and closing fast.
Why it matters
01 / 03
How firms pay for AI changes.
When systems deliver outcomes, buyers should pay for the performance of AI, not the promise of it.
This is where the work begins.
Explore the quantware era
The book
Quantware
The Post-Software & Post-Product Era in Business & Technology
Ideapress Publishing, distributed by Simon & Schuster. Hardcover and ebook, March 9, 2027.
Quantware builds the management system for the AI era: how firms scale, organize around and measure intelligent systems, with the frameworks to do it (RaaS, PROVE, the node, NOVA and ROIS).
Why now?
The urgency
I am compelled to explain AI as a value system, so that the leaders who work with AI can name what is happening to them. Executives are inundated with AI headlines, vendor promises, and speculative forecasts. Glib predictions tell them that AI will transform everything, automate everything. What they need is a coherent mental model of what an AI business is, how it behaves, how it creates value, and what it demands of their organizations. This book is to narrow that gap.
My vantage point
From production lines to intelligent systems
I started as a chemical engineer in advanced manufacturing, on production lines and in pilot plants, then spent years as a product leader in software, including roles at Amazon and SAS. For the last decade I have advised companies on how they create and capture value, through corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and new business models, as founder of Pricing Innovations. Across more than thirty technology domains, I kept seeing the same pattern: each new technology arrives faster than the firm's ability to govern it. Quantware is my account of the latest and largest of those shifts, and of what leaders can build in response. I also teach at the University of Minnesota, where I earned my MBA, after a BS in Chemical Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.
Short bio for event programs
Esra Kucukciftci is an author, strategist, and educator, and the Founder and CEO of Pricing Innovations. With a career spanning more than thirty technology domains through to artificial intelligence, she specializes in how modern businesses evolve, create value, and adapt to technological change. Her work has guided major corporate strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and industry-shaping business models. She held technology and product leadership roles at Amazon and SAS, holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from Boğaziçi University and an MBA from the University of Minnesota, where she is a lecturer. She is the author of Quantware: The Post-Software & Post-Product Era in Business & Technology (Ideapress, 2027).
Keynotes and workshops
Talks that change how leaders run AI
Stop Selling AI's Activity. Start Selling Its Outcomes.
Pricing AI by consumption or activity gives the value away. Learn how firms move from SaaS to RaaS, where buyers pay for outcomes that evolve just as dynamically as the technology itself.
Product Is Dead. Meet the Node.
The product organization was the right answer for software, but it cannot govern systems that deliver value dynamically. Meet the node, and the dynamic organizational network nodes form: NOVA.
Jensen Huang Called AI a Five-Layer Cake. The AI Economic Stack Has Eight Layers.
The AI economic stack has eight layers, not five. Each layer has different commercial terms, performance standards, scale metrics, cost structures, and pricing levers. Learn how AI deployments span multiple layers at once and how to write the contracts that govern them.
Bring Quantware to your leadership team
Keynotes, workshops, media and bulk orders.