Administrative work can eat up a lot of time and effort, causing staff to get bogged down and cutting down on time they have to address other important aspects of their work that need attention. Devin Abraham, MBA '25, saw this firsthand during his time at the New York City Housing Authority. Frontline staff-deeply committed to serving residents-were spending countless hours buried in paperwork: logging tenant requests, updating compliance reports, and manually processing vouchers. "Meanwhile, the real challenges of public housing-urgent maintenance delays, unresolved safety and harassment complaints, stalled voucher approvals, and missed connections to eviction prevention or supportive services-continued to mount," he said. "The issue wasn't effort. It was infrastructure. The system relied on outdated tools that simply couldn't keep pace with the complexity or urgency of the work."
That's why Abraham founded Liiv, a startup that uses AI agents to automate and streamline workflows, saving municipalities, civic agencies, and nonprofits valuable time and freeing up staff time to focus on other things. "We've built AI tools that are already saving cities thousands of hours - and we're just getting started," Abraham says.
Abraham credits the Executive MBA Metro NY program at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, part of the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, with getting Liiv off the ground. He's grateful to classmates who made him think bigger and take risks, to faculty mentors who kept him grounded and inspired confidence, and to the Johnson Summer Accelerator for funding and feedback.
