Startups from Pay-i, Cascade, Autessa and GemaTEG were pitch their AI ideas at GeekWire’s Agents of Transformation event in Seattle. The winners were chosen by a panel of judges including Bryan Hale of Anthos Capital, Yifan Zhang of AI House, and T.A. McCann of Pioneer Square Labs. The ideas included an AI spend management platform that tracks ROI across an organization's entire AI footprint, not just tokens, but the full cost stack including models, tools, and GPU resources. An agentic HR and IT support platform that deploys AI agents to handle sensitive employee situations confidentially and around the clock, freeing HR teams for higher-stakes human judgment. The outlier of the group was a hardware thermal management company using solid-state cooling technology that requires no water and uses 40% less power than conventional systems.