Every Consulting Project Starts From Scratch. Intriq Is Changing That.
Jess Liew spent over a decade watching consulting teams rebuild from zero on every new engagement, manually assembling data before the real work could even begin. She built Intriq to break that cycle, so advisors can skip the groundwork and get straight to the insights their clients actually need.
Jess Liew built Intriq to solve a problem she watched consume the consulting industry for over a decade. Every new engagement, whether in restructuring, M&A, or complex multi-jurisdictional work, begins the same way: someone is assigned to manually pull together all the data before the real work can even start. The AI consulting platform she founded changes that, replacing the rebuild-from-scratch cycle with a system that surfaces insights from the moment a project opens. Jess spent ten years inside consulting before she built the alternative. She knew exactly what she was fixing.
She has also always been drawn to things that demand full presence. Surfing teaches you to read the water before you can ever ride it. Show jumping gives you a fraction of a second to assess a fence and commit. These are disciplines built entirely around the ability to take in information fast and act before the moment passes. It turns out that is a pretty good description of what building Intriq has required.
She was the only woman in the room
Along the way, she took on a role at a finance firm, and in 2021, found herself the first and only woman on a team of more than 100 men. She was not surprised by the imbalance. She had seen how these environments were built. What she did not expect was what came next.
The treatment she experienced was unfair in ways that were hard to ignore and easy to sweep aside, which is exactly what most people around her encouraged her to do. Keep quiet. Don't make it complicated. But Jess had spent years in environments where you read the situation clearly and act with full commitment. She did that here, too. She stood her ground and did not back down when it would have been far easier to walk away.
That experience clarified what she wanted to do next. Consulting was slow to change and slower still to change who got to lead inside it. During COVID, managing operations across 25 jurisdictions while rules shifted by the day, the deeper problem came into focus. Information arrived late. Decisions were made on last month's data. The gap between what was happening and what people knew was costing everyone. When ChatGPT arrived, and the wider world began to understand what AI could actually do, she had already made up her mind.
A profession built on starting over
Every consulting engagement begins from scratch. Analysts spend their time gathering and structuring data rather than thinking. The insights that should drive decisions are buried under process, and by the time they surface, the window has often already closed.
"If you peel back the onion," she says, "it is painfully manual when it comes to data, and there is so much repeatability in the work done on every single project."
Intriq handles the analyst layer, pulling together and surfacing data so that the consultant can focus on what requires actual judgment. Clients want their advisors. What they should also want is an advisor working from live numbers rather than reacting to last month's report.
Speed is the real competitive advantage
The future Jess is working toward is a hybrid one. A consultant working alongside a system that generates live insights, so that the conversation with a client reflects what the data shows right now. In M&A, deals do not wait. In restructuring, conditions shift by the day. Every delay has a price, and the advisor who can act on current information holds a fundamentally different position than one who cannot.
During a pitching tour that took her through Qatar, the UAE, and across Europe, that message sharpened considerably. The interest from firms was real, and so was the recognition that the consulting world still has some way to go in understanding what AI can genuinely deliver. "It's taken a while for people to come around the corner and see what this tech can really do," she says. "And that's going to continue to shift."
Two years in, Intriq has been finding its footing in firms where being slow is genuinely expensive. Jess is measured about the progress. "Startups are very up and down," she says. "But we have had a pretty good run recently."
She also takes a longer view on what she is building. Finance has been slow to broaden who gets to lead, and Jess has lived that reality firsthand. She is deliberate about building a balanced team, not as a gesture, but because she knows exactly what it costs when that balance is missing.
And if her track record tells you anything, it is that she does not walk away from things that matter. She reads a situation, she commits, and she keeps going until she gets it right.
About Flashpoint POV Spotlights
Flashpoint Global produces each Founder POV Spotlight using its proprietary category leadership framework. Every Spotlight begins with a Future Narrative session, where a founder’s POV is clarified and operationalized as the lens through which new categories are built. The result is content that moves founders beyond product messaging and into the role of category leader, helping the market understand the problem, the stakes, and the future being created.
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