Why Agentive Became Punchcard

We walked away from the name Agentive because the idea worked.

When we started, agentive design felt like a precise way to describe what we were building: software that acts on your behalf. But within a year, the market caught up. Every company was building an agent. Every product was suddenly agentic. A name that once helped us explain the future no longer helped us stand apart.

Before the name changed, it was worth explaining why Agentive mattered in the first place.

In 2020, Northwestern's Master of Product Design and Development Management application asked me to describe a trend that would influence product design and development over the next five years. I wrote about agentive design and became obsessed with it.

For decades, products ran on interaction design: buttons, inputs, forms, and workflows that required people to keep poking software to get value from it. Agentive design flips that. With advances in AI and machine learning, products can act on your behalf. You set the work in motion, and the product keeps moving in the background.

The simple example was a Roomba. Early models needed you to move them from room to room. Modern ones run on a schedule, map your home, park themselves, charge themselves, and empty themselves. You can forget the product exists until it needs help.

Another example was the Virtual Line system I helped build at Universal Orlando's Volcano Bay. You reserve a slide by tapping a wearable, float in the lazy river while your agent waits in line, and get tapped when it is your turn. Step off the slide and your ride photo is already in the app. No line. No photo counter. Less boredom. More fun.

The trend was simple: more of the work people want done will be handed to a product acting as their agent. I wanted to lead that shift.

That essay helped get me into grad school. Three years later, in 2023, I founded Substantive AI and named the product Agentive: the first AI-powered audit software built to act as an agent for auditors.

The product starts auditing the moment a client uploads documents. It runs in the background, traces answers to sources, and frees auditors for the work that needs a human: strategy, judgment, and relationships. It was the need I first felt in 2014 while auditing at EY.

Then agentic became the word every company started using.

So we chose Punchcard.

Punchcards were one of the original automation interfaces in accounting and business operations. They were physical instructions for machines to do structured work at scale. That history fits the future we are building: audit work that is structured, traceable, and increasingly performed by software, with human judgment still in charge.

Agentive described the behavior. Punchcard gives us a category to define.

New name. New domain. Same mission: make audit work simpler, faster, and more enjoyable.

What Punchcard Is Building

The name changed, but the product direction did not. Punchcard is focused on AI audit automation that increases professional judgment, starting with workflows like substantive testing automation, EBP audit testing, and financial statement review.