Podcast Ep 331: From exam prep to professional capability, we talk to Dee Lyons from Acuru about how her start-up rewriting how law and finance firms train their people in the age of AI.
When Dee Lyons left a big four consulting career spanning tax advisory and wealth management to start an edtech company, she did not set out to rebrand it after a Tolkien language. That, she says, came later.
What drove her was something more prosaic: a conviction that the professional services industry was selling its clients an increasingly outdated version of how people learn.
“It’s mission-critical for the businesses that people know their IFRS standards, that they pass their tax exams to become qualified tax consultants or qualified accountants”
Today her business Acuru, formerly known as Examfly, is betting that artificial intelligence has created a skills gap inside professional services firms that their existing training providers are not equipped to fill.
“My origin thesis was that the first wave of online learning really just focused on taking the existing learning model and putting it online,” she says. “All that changed was the manner of delivery. It was still the same old talking head, PowerPoint, limited interactivity, not necessarily very engaging, while at the same time everyone’s attention spans were going downhill.”
The company she founded, originally called Examfly, has since rebranded as Acuru and shifted its sights from helping candidates pass professional exams toward something it believes is a more urgent and lucrative problem: building the professional judgment and critical thinking skills that junior staff inside big accountancy and law firms are no longer developing on the job, because AI is doing much of the work for them.
A gap left by the machines
The thesis is rooted in a structural change playing out inside professional services. As AI tools take on more of the lower-level drafting and analysis that once served as the training ground for graduate recruits, firms are finding that the traditional apprenticeship model is quietly breaking down. A trainee who might once have spent months drafting client memos, reviewing contracts or building tax computations is now more likely to review and approve AI-generated output. The repetition that builds expertise is vanishing.
“The more junior members of staff are no longer getting the on-the-job expertise and training that they once did because AI is doing a lot of the early drafts,” Lyons says. “That’s a gap that we fill, in that we can help them build those skills of critical thinking and judgment, give them the repetitions they need to build the skills that they’re now missing out on.”
“If the lower-level work is being commoditised or eaten up by AI, we help firms reimagine their business models around the more sophisticated work they do.”
The company has raised approximately €2m to date, including a seed round of €1.5m led by Brian Caulfield, one of Ireland’s best-known technology investors. It counts most of the big four accounting and professional services firms among its customers, and has been building an advisory board of senior former partners at global firms to open doors that cold outreach cannot.
Acuru’s core product is built around what Lyons describes as the science of learning: the idea that knowledge in complex technical domains, whether IFRS accounting standards or tax legislation, is acquired not through passive consumption of video content but through repeated practice with immediate feedback. The platform combines animation, interactive testing tools and, increasingly, AI-generated scenarios that give learners something closer to the experience of working on real client problems.
Rounding down the completion rate problem
The online learning industry has long struggled with a basic measurement: most people who enrol in a course do not finish it. Industry figures suggest that typical completion rates for online courses sit below ten per cent. Lyons is candid about having experienced this herself as a learner, and says Acuru’s design is built around the structural reasons why people disengage.
Part of the answer, she argues, lies in the nature of the market Acuru has chosen. In regulated professional services domains, the stakes of not acquiring certain knowledge are unusually high: practitioners who have not passed the required exams may be legally prohibited from doing certain work. That removes the optionality that allows most online learners to drift away.
“We do have that career impetus as a push factor on engagement,” she says. “It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s kind of mission-critical for the businesses, for example, that people know their IFRS standards, that they pass their tax exams to become qualified tax consultants or qualified accountants.”
The gamification that Acuru builds into its platform is, Lyons insists, substantive rather than cosmetic. “When you hear gamification, it’s very superficial sometimes. It’s just badges and buttons and a bell rings when you do something.” What the company aims for, she says, is technology that merges the skill sets required in professional practice with the engagement mechanics of modern digital products.
What wizardry is this?
The decision to move on from the Exam Fly name was driven by the business model shift. Examfly was, as Lyons puts it, “very literal” and carried consumer product associations that sat awkwardly with the firm’s repositioning as a provider of professional capability infrastructure to large corporate clients.
The new name, Acuru, comes from an unexpected source. Lyons describes herself as a Tolkien enthusiast and found the word in one of the invented languages that run through the Lord of the Rings author’s work. “Kuru has the connotation of skilled or mastery in one of the Tolkien languages,” she says. “And actually someone then, after that, told me that in Latin it has the connotation of ‘to pay attention to’, which is at the heart of learning.” She pronounces it to rhyme with pursue.
The rebrand was handled with deliberate economy. Rather than engage an agency and spend months on the process, the team secured press coverage to mark the announcement, briefed existing customers individually on the rationale before going public, and updated the website. Lyons frames the lightness of touch as appropriate to Acuru’s stage and resources, but also as a reflection of priorities: the business model, in her view, always comes before the brand.
“The name and brand are very much downstream of the business model,” she says. “The most important thing is that the business model works and has promise.”
“You don’t want to fall into the trap of just being at every ecosystem event and feeling like a founder at the expense of actually building something and showing it to customers.”
An epic journey
Getting into the big accounting and professional services firms required Lyons to work through personal connections built during her years at PwC before moving to advisory relationships with former senior partners who could open doors she could not reach through her own network. Cold email, she is clear, does not work in this market.
“It’s not really the type of thing where you can blast out a load of cold emails and expect to be getting in the door with the head of line of service of one of the big four,” she says. “So it’s been true connections, some thought leadership, building up credibility in the space.”
The firm runs webinars and publishes commentary on how artificial intelligence is reshaping professional services, partly as a way of earning the right to a meeting even with potential clients who are not yet ready to buy. “Even if people aren’t going to buy from us, at least they’ll take a meeting because they feel like we have something interesting to say about the future of their profession.”
Acuru’s current business model with larger firms is increasingly consultative, with the company working closely with clients from the outset to understand how their professional capability requirements are shifting. Lyons says the company has one or two significant opportunities in progress this year that will test whether the repositioned model can scale, and that a further fundraise is likely to follow if the validation holds.
AI as enabler, not rival
The question of whether AI will simply eat the market for professional training is one Lyons has thought about carefully. Her answer is that the analogy to worry about is not the one most people reach for.
“In theory, anyone can learn anything through AI, but it was previously true that in theory anyone could learn anything through the internet or YouTube,” she says. “It doesn’t necessarily make the market for corporate education and training go away.”
In her specific market, she argues, the non-deterministic nature of current AI models remains a regulatory problem. In domains where technical accuracy must be absolute, a 1% error rate is not a nuisance: it is a liability. Acuru maintains verification systems that the raw outputs of AI models cannot replicate. She also senses a growing weariness with learning through chat windows as the primary interface.
“I’m sensing now a jadedness, that people are getting a bit sick of just constantly interacting through chat windows,” she says. “We’re not selling text in the chat window. We’re selling highly interactive learning journeys with digital media and novel testing tools.”
For now, she sees AI as accelerating Acuru’s production capacity and enabling new features, particularly around real-time feedback on open-ended questions that mirror client scenarios.
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