From a pioneer of the expert network - reimagined for the age of AI.
In 1994, our founder, Russ Rosenzweig, helped build one of the world's first expert networks - and in doing so helped create an industry. The premise then was simple and, at the time, radical: somewhere in the world there is a person who has spent a career on exactly the question in front of you, and reaching that person should not be a matter of luck.
Back then, finding that person was the hard part. It took weeks of referrals, a rolodex, and a great deal of patience. The entire expert-network industry was built to solve that one problem, and it solved it well enough to become a multi-billion-dollar business.
Thirty-two years later, that is no longer the problem. An intelligent research desk can read your question, search the whole of the published record, and surface the specialists whose work bears directly on it - in a single conversation. Access has become cheap.
What did not become cheap is understanding. A transcript is not an answer. Five hours of calls is not a synthesis. Knowing which of two experts to believe, and why, and what would change their minds, is still hard work that requires judgment.
So the people who helped invent expert research rebuilt it for the world as it is now, under a name with its own heritage in the field: Vista Research. Not to arrange calls - to deliver understanding.