From Data Chaos to Clarity: How Lior Gerson and TargetBoard.ai Are Reinventing KPIs with AI

In this edition of Bright Founders Talk, we are thrilled to welcome Lior Gerson, Co-Founder and CEO of TargetBoard.ai. With a storied career spanning over 30 years in tech, Lior has played key roles in building transformative companies like MySupermarket and Vroom.com, the latter of which IPOed for $2.5 billion. 

His latest venture, TargetBoard.ai, is the culmination of decades of experience navigating complex business environments and uncovering hidden inefficiencies. In our conversation, Lior shares how TargetBoard.ai serves as an end-to-end KPI platform, helping companies surface operational waste and unlock new levels of performance. What makes the platform truly unique is its ability to evolve through collective intelligence—learning from each customer to improve outcomes for all. 

Lior dives into the importance of measurable efficiency, strategic alignment, and how AI can transform managerial decision-making. Whether you're a startup founder or leading a large enterprise, this interview is packed with insights into how technology can drive clarity and impact. Let’s explore how Lior and his team are helping businesses run not just faster—but smarter.

Business Waste Is Everywhere—And Lior Gerson Has a Plan to Eliminate It

Lior Gerson doesn’t just build companies—he builds clarity. After decades of scaling successful ventures like MySupermarket and Vroom, Lior’s new mission with TargetBoard.ai is simple: help businesses understand what’s actually going on inside them. "Most managers are flying blind," he says. They’re drowning in data but starving for insight. That’s where TargetBoard steps in—a one-stop platform that connects to all your tools, surfaces your KPIs, and shows you the truth behind your operations. No fluff, no guesswork—just real, actionable understanding.

What’s fascinating about TargetBoard isn’t just the technology—it’s the philosophy behind it. Lior compares a business to an engine: complex, powerful, but inevitably full of inefficiencies. And the bigger the company, the more fuel it wastes. “You probably have like 60% waste in what your people could actually produce—and you don’t even know it,” he explains. From pointless meetings to misaligned priorities, Lior and his team are on a mission to find the leaks and patch them fast. The result? A smoother, smarter, faster-running machine.

But here’s the kicker—TargetBoard gets smarter with every new customer. The platform is designed to evolve, learning from each use case and feeding that intelligence back into the community. Whether it’s a product leader, a revops manager, or an engineering head, every user shapes the platform for the better. And it doesn’t take weeks of onboarding to get there—just hours. “Businesses are more similar than they think,” Lior says. “We just help them speak their own language—only more clearly.”

Stop Drowning in Spreadsheets: Lior Gerson on Smarter, Faster KPI Tracking

For Lior Gerson, working with customers isn’t about managing unrealistic expectations—it’s about unlocking what they already know they need. “A customer who knows what they want is always going to be happier,” he tells us. TargetBoard’s secret sauce? A pre-built, flexible catalog of KPIs that can adapt to any business, fast. So when a client walks in with a “wishlist,” Lior doesn’t flinch. Instead, he sees it as a clear roadmap—and the platform is designed to adjust on the fly. No waiting, no bloated setup cycles. It’s plug, play, and show value almost immediately.

But let’s talk skeptics—the ones still clinging to Excel spreadsheets and manual dashboards. Lior’s got a message for them too: just try it. “You plug in and it works. If you don’t like it, go back to Excel,” he shrugs with a grin. TargetBoard doesn’t ask you to build from scratch or hire a small army of analysts. It’s all no-code, fully automated, and accessible in the way that works best for you—visual dashboards, conversational reports, and everything in between. Basically, it’s data without the headache.

One of the biggest pitfalls Lior sees? Companies obsessing over the “right” KPIs—so much so, they end up tracking only a narrow slice of what matters. Why? Because building KPIs the old way is expensive and time-consuming. That’s where TargetBoard flips the script. Every metric you could need is already there, waiting to be dragged and dropped into your dashboard. If priorities shift next week? No problem. "We removed the barrier and the cost of just getting you what you need when you need it," Lior explains. It's flexible KPI tracking for a world that doesn’t stop moving.

AI Is the New SQL: Why Lior Gerson Isn’t Falling for the Hype—But He’s Still Betting Big

If you think Lior Gerson is swept up in the AI buzz, think again. He’s intrigued, sure—but he’s also cautious. “AI is a tool. It does some things well, some things not so well,” he says, channeling a healthy dose of founder realism. At TargetBoard, Lior and his team are digging into exactly how AI fits into the world of data and analytics—not just slapping it onto dashboards for show. One recent win? An AI-driven notification engine that not only alerts users to key metric changes but actually recommends what should trigger an alert, personalized to each role. That’s the kind of subtle but powerful AI Lior gets excited about—useful, contextual, and quietly smart.

But he’s the first to admit: we’re not quite there yet. While TargetBoard’s platform can let you ask questions like, “How many deals did we close last month?”, Lior knows that raw AI alone can’t always be trusted with business-critical answers. So they’ve built an entire verification layer to double-check results and make sure what you see is actually accurate. “I hope AI gets to a point where it can be trusted with your data on its own. But until then—we’ve got it covered,” Lior adds. The vibe here isn’t anti-AI. It’s pro-reliability—something that’s easy to overlook when the hype machine’s running full speed.

Surprisingly, resistance to AI isn’t always where you'd expect it. Lior says age isn’t the barrier people assume. “Experience is what makes people skeptical—not age,” he notes. Veteran execs don’t slam the door on AI; they just ask tougher questions before inviting it in. And as for innovation vs. feasibility? Lior’s confident the tech is already here—you just need the right team to build with it. “We’re taking customers from companies 100 times our size,” he says, grinning. “That’s the fun part.”

Forget the Old Playbook: Lior Gerson on Reinventing KPIs, Ditching BI Teams, and Going Faster

Lior Gerson has seen it all before—literally. “I gave a KPI pitch recently, and the woman told me it was the same one she gave to Boeing 50 years ago,” he says with a smirk. That’s exactly the problem he’s solving with TargetBoard: a system built not to patch over outdated methods, but to replace them entirely. No more stacking tool after tool just to get half-decent reports. With TargetBoard, it’s all there—ETLs, data warehouse, semantic and governance layers, reporting, insights—out of the box and already tailored to your business. For companies tired of assembling their own Frankenstein analytics setup, Lior’s vision is a breath of fresh air.

For early-stage founders, he keeps it real. If you're still hunting for product-market fit, KPIs shouldn't be your obsession—yet. But when you're ready to scale, they become your rocket fuel. “The less you waste, the faster you go,” Lior says. That’s when tools like TargetBoard shine: near-zero implementation cost, no technical team required, and flexible dashboards that evolve with your company. Some of their customers even skipped hiring BI teams altogether, thanks to how fast and customizable the platform is. The idea? Make analytics effortless, not effortful.

Looking ahead, Lior sees a future where even conversational AI could eventually take over business reporting—once trust catches up to tech. But until then, he’s focused on empowering users now, not someday. And when it comes to advice for founders? He’s got two golden rules: learn from other people’s mistakes, and don’t let doubt kill your vision. “If everyone says it’s a bad idea, they might be wrong—and that could be your opportunity,” he says. Spoken like someone who's not just disrupting the system—but rebuilding it from the ground up.