From Google to building materials: AAXIS’ Yann Goarin on AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity in legacy industries

Yann Goarin spent a decade at Google and YouTube, running go-to-market across more than 20 product launches and shipping software to millions of users. Then he walked away from the obvious path and started looking at the markets Silicon Valley keeps passing over.

His argument is blunt: the next defensible AI companies won’t come from generic horizontal tools. They’ll come from the huge, stubborn industries where domain knowledge matters more than slick software, and where old workflows have gone untouched for years because they were too messy, too expensive, or too closed off to fix before large language models and cheaper data changed the equation.

Goarin left Google in 2023 and founded Zag Labs, an advisory firm focused on product-market fit. Over the next two years, he worked with more than a hundred early-stage founders, and that work, he says, showed him the same pattern again and again: the startups fighting hardest for traction were often chasing broad markets, while much bigger problems sat in industries that tech people barely study.

A year ago, that conviction found a home at AAXIS, a 26-year enterprise technology consultancy whose customers include Ferguson Enterprises and QXO. The firm is moving its core business toward custom vertical AI and setting up a venture arm, and it brought in Goarin as its first Founder in Residence to lead its first venture. AAXIS says he adds product and go-to-market muscle to its industrial relationships and AI engineering.

The first target is building materials distribution, with HVAC as the starting point. Goarin describes it as a fragmented market under pressure from private equity rollups, still relying on old vendor software that has not improved in two decades. Century Intelligence, incorporated in April 2026, has already shipped BranchKinect, a sales automation product for HVAC distributors, signed three design partnerships, and is in active talks with more than a dozen warm prospects.

The method is deliberately old-school. Goarin wants to earn entry by spending time on site, mapping workflows, quantifying the pain, and building alongside design partners. He is already looking at plumbing distribution next, and at pricing optimisation inside building materials as a separate venture. The pitch is simple: stop building for abstract markets, and start building for industries with real pain, real buyers, and real reasons to say yes.