About us
Not AI specifically. The shift underneath it: that the way work gets done was about to change faster than most organizations could absorb, and that the companies who thrived would be the ones who changed their people, not just their tools. The NoW of Work is a Human-Centered AI Transformation company built on that conviction, a decade before it was obvious.
Our founding story
In 2010, Rocky Ozaki walked away from the corporate world. He’d spent years inside large organizations, in people, culture, and corporate innovation. Good companies, full of capable people, all running on the same operating assumptions: annual plans, slow decisions, change as a project with an end date.
Then he joined Vancouver’s startup scene, and later served as VP and Head of Corporate Innovation at the BC Tech Association, with a front-row seat to both worlds at once.
The startups weren’t smarter. They just worked differently: faster loops, flatter decisions, people trusted to act. And the gap between how they worked and how established companies worked was widening every year.
“Within three months I was converted. Every company, I realized, would one day operate as a technology company.”
Why we exist
The standard answer to that gap was technology. Buy the software, run the training, hope it sticks.
Rocky had watched that movie from the inside. The tools arrived, the behaviour didn’t change, and eighteen months later the licences sat unused while everyone went back to how they’d always worked. The failure was never the technology. It was that nobody redesigned the work, and nobody brought the people along.
So in 2016 he founded The NoW of Work to do the opposite: bring the discipline of large companies and the agility of startups together, and treat transformation as a human challenge first.
Four years later, COVID proved the thesis in the hardest way possible. Nearly every organization was pushed into a new way of working overnight. The ones who coped weren’t the ones with the best tech stack. They were the ones whose people could adapt.
Then AI arrived
The lever has changed. The belief hasn’t: technology changes nothing until people do. That’s why we treat AI transformation as a behaviour and culture challenge, not a software rollout. We AI-enable people first, then build the AI-enabled organization around them.
Our name
NoW is an acronym for the Now of Work. It’s a play on the term “the future of work,” and a small argument with it. We believe that organizations who are waiting for some future to arrive may find themselves falling further and further behind in an exponential world.
Our trademarked tagline is, fittingly:
The Future is NoW. Are you ready?™
Our mission
Change is unsettling. Our job is to make it feel like something else. We bring Calm, Clarity, Confidence, Compassion, Creativity and Core Capabilities to people and organizations during rapidly changing and uncertain times.
We call these our 7 Cs, and like all the waters of the world (the 7 Seas), our team will support you no matter where you call home, or where you are in your modernization and AI journey.
The people
Rocky combines a decade of senior leadership roles in large enterprise with nearly 10 years in startup and scale-up tech to form what he believes is the operational DNA of all modern companies. Prior to launching NoW, Rocky was the Vice-President and Head of Corporate Innovation for the BC Tech Association. He is also a 3x startup founder with 1 exit.
Ashleah scaled Jane App from $5M to $120M+ in annual recurring revenue as its first marketing hire, with no traditional sales team and no outside capital. Across 25 years of building, he’s learned that durable growth comes from systems people actually use, not strategies that sit on a shelf. Alongside Rocky, he leads client delivery and the firm’s own AI-enabled operations.
Our team brings backgrounds across Fortune 500 companies, startup tech, and education, with real experience in executive leadership, people and culture, marketing, operations, boards, and social impact. When an engagement calls for more hands, we bring in facilitators and consultants trained in our frameworks, and a member of our core team always leads the work. It’s how we deliver across North America without diluting what makes the work ours.
Our differentiators
We’re not a consulting firm that employs people who have never built or run a business, and we’re not a pop-up AI training company. We’ve built and scaled real businesses, and we bring that to yours.
Our own company runs on AI, OKRs, Agile and all the other modern operating frameworks we bring to our clients.
The goal isn’t a dependency on us. It’s a company that runs AI on its own. Every engagement transfers capability to your team.
Our core values
We create, reflect and iterate. Constant improvement is baked into all we do.
We believe in improving the world we live in, and we always see the glass as half full.
Transformation moves at the speed of trust. We earn it before we ask your people to change how they work.
Book a call. We’ll show you where AI fits in your business, and how your team leads it.
