How Twelfth Brain aims to capture judgment, not just words
Subh Mukherjee is the founder of Twelfth Brain, an AI product and solutioning company that captures how people think and models their judgment. The conversation covers the personal need behind the business, how early clients helped shape its direction, and why people still need to decide what AI means and what it should stand for.
Start by understanding the problem and the system underneath it, rather than following early AI hype. Twelfth Brain’s approach keeps decisions with people and uses AI to structure, sequence and derive within clear boundaries.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
Twelfth Brain started with my own need to solve capture, ideation, imagination and connecting the dots. This was a time when even the name was not Twelfth Brain. I wanted to capture my thoughts so they could be expressed in a different context, across contexts, and give a perspective which was uniquely mine. When I started working with agents in the very early days, knowing both content and how AI works from my experience, I was not happy at all with what the results looked like.
That is still what makes it different. Twelfth Brain captures how a person thinks as they live and work, then models their judgment, not just their words, so it can be handed over, queried, or expressed in their own voice rather than lost. Every output traces back to a source in their own record, and that record compounds over years into an asset no competitor can recreate by starting later.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
My first customers came from my extended network. They were fascinated with what I was doing as I walked with them, and the results showed as well. A current client of mine started using Twelfth Brain and started seeing how their thoughts were being used to decide on their behalf, guiding their teams. I still remember, when they saw it happen over a call, the look on their face and the way they spoke about it.
As someone who hadn’t been active on social media for well over a decade, I used LinkedIn primarily to grow my network, and it worked for me. We have a very small set of clients right now, but that is by design. Most new business today comes from a closed network, because I am taking a product-first approach.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision came from a client. They wanted to get the essence of their voice out without sounding like ‘ChatGPT’ in nearly all aspects of their business, not just social content, but every place they had to be heard, or where their EAs were taking decisions on their behalf. I positioned Twelfth Brain around that, with AI working within strict boundaries to sequence, crunch and derive, not decide.
The mistake that taught me the most came before Twelfth Brain. To come from an IT background with the understanding of solutioning, massive infrastructure, massive connections, applications, architecture, and then to think that you know how to create a product just does not work. Product creation from an engineering perspective is so different from creating IT solutions, although the base is the same. I have been through this, been burned by it, and emerged from it as well.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
AI is quite good at finding what most people have in common, and that is, in a way, the trap. If you let it go first, you get the average message, which is the one nobody remembers. Deciding what something means, and what you’ll stand for, still has to come from a person.
AI has changed nearly every part of my work, from how I research and define products to how I manage projects. Now I take the decisions, and give AI the steps in a large amount of detail. It’s my experience and knowledge combined with the speed and approach of AI. And I am working on redefining Twelfth Brain. With the latest developments in tech, I am moving away from the application layers to the heart of what I am building, and that’s a relief.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Start with first principles and really get down to understanding how things work. It’s never linear. It’s systematic. For me, that means before opening any AI tool, I already have in my mind what I want to structure and write.
What I’d tell them to ignore is the advice I rejected myself: the early hype of building AI systems on markdown files, with no thought for the architecture underneath. Saying no to that pushed me to explore database structures working alongside AI processing. That became one of the founding pillars of Twelfth Brain, and it’s why we aren’t building a shallow product.
Thank you to Subh Mukherjee and the team at Twelfth Brain for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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