How the CEO of Bluehost Group and Network Solutions Group is reinventing two iconic internet brands for an AI-native world — and why the humans inside the company are the real competitive advantage
When Sachin Puri talks about trust, he reaches for a framework he has carried with him across nearly three decades in online business.
“Relevance really comes down to trust,” he says. “And the relationship that you build on an ongoing basis.”
That conviction sits at the center of everything Puri is building as CEO of Bluehost Group and Network Solutions Group, part of Newfold Digital, a company that manages the digital identities of more than 6 million customers across 200-plus countries. The scale of their services is enormous, but in practice, their approach to customer care is far more personal than the numbers suggest.
Relevance Is the Real Product
Puri has spent close to three decades watching the internet evolve from newspaper ads to banner campaigns, from early search engines to social media, and now into the era of AI-generated answers and autonomous agents. Through every wave, one thing has remained constant: the businesses that survive are the ones that stay relevant to the people they serve.
“Attention has multiple elements,” he explains. “One is being in front of somebody. But the most important piece — the one that really comes from my experience — is that what you are saying is resonating with the other person in a meaningful way. That they are ready to take an action.”
For the small and medium-sized businesses that Newfold serves — the pizza shop owner, the florist, the family-run bakery with a grandmother’s clam chowder recipe that “is better than anything in the world”, staying relevant has never been more complicated. Five years ago, a customer who wanted to find a local business would perform a Google search, click a link, and land on a website. Today, that same customer might ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation, check a local directory, scan a Google Business Profile, check out your social page, and read reviews on three different platforms before making a decision.
“Each touchpoint has become incredibly more important now than ever before,” Puri says. “How you show up on LLMs, Social Media, Review sites, etc. all of that adds into who you are for the customer that you’re going after.”
This is the problem Newfold is increasingly focused on solving. Through its portfolio of brands including Bluehost and Network Solutions, two names that helped define the early internet, the company gives small businesses the tools, technology, and support they need to show up consistently, credibly, and compellingly across every channel that matters.
And Puri is clear-eyed about what is at stake. “About half of new businesses don’t even make it to five years,” he says, pausing to let the number land. “I don’t think enough has been said about that data point. But those who make it through the first five years have beaten the hardest odds. Their chances of sticking around only get stronger.”
For the people who work at Newfold, that statistic makes the mission deeply personal. Every product shipped, every support call answered, and every training resource published is a small act of advocacy for a business owner who is trying to beat the odds.
The Trust Equation
To understand how Puri thinks about relevance, and why it matters so much to the work Newfold does, it helps to understand the framework he has used for most of his career.
He calls it the modified Trust Equation, and it has four components.
The first is credibility: the external proof that you are who you say you are. For Newfold, that credibility is built into the company’s DNA. Network Solutions was the very first domain registrar when the commercial internet was born. Bluehost has been WordPress’s recommended hosting partner since 2005, just two years after WordPress launched and changed the economics of website-building for small businesses forever. “We have been the very first registrar from the very first time that the internet came about and dot coms came about,” Puri says. “40-plus years running.”
The second is reliability: the ratio of what you say to what you do. “What you told me versus what you do builds trust,” Puri explains. “Keeping your promises. You measure that with your say-do ratio.”
The third, the one Puri describes as “magical,” is shared values. “What do we have in common? It doesn’t need to be demographic or location. But the values that we share.” For Newfold, that shared value has been consistent since the beginning: delivering technology that creates a level playing field for small businesses. It is not a tagline. It is the reason the company has invested so heavily in making complex technology accessible, affordable, and usable for people whose primary expertise is making great food, beautiful flowers, or exceptional service — not managing DNS records.
The fourth component is self-orientation, and it actually works in reverse. The more a company appears to be acting in its own interest rather than the customer’s, the lower the trust. “The more self-orientation in how you behave and present yourself, the lower the trust you engender,” Puri says.
Put together, the Trust Equation is a management system that shapes how Newfold builds products, trains support teams, prices services, and measures success.
Human-First Is a Business Decision
In a technology company in 2026, saying you believe in human connection can sound like a defensive posture, a way of hedging against the AI wave rather than riding it. But for Puri and Newfold Digital, human-first is more than a slogan.
Bluehost recently published an SMB study that found 87% of small business owners are using at least one AI tool today. “But the adoption for most is limited to general-purpose LLMs,” Puri notes, “and regardless of quantity or range of tool adoption, only 20% report high confidence in their use of AI. But those who self-reported high confidence were about three times more likely to report positive revenue impact.”
The gap between adoption and competence is exactly where Newfold operates.
“Our fundamental belief,” Puri says, “is that accessibility to new technology is limited in the beginning to large enterprises. Companies like us try to make it accessible to SMBs in a seamless way.”
That belief shapes a deliberate choice: even as Newfold deploys AI across its products and operations, it has kept humans at the center of the customer experience. Puri is quick to note that Newfold’s AI-powered support achieves customer satisfaction rates “almost as good as human,” there are always moments when technology alone cannot do what a person can.
He tells a story to illustrate the point.
A husband and wife had successfully built their business over many years. Their domain name was their digital identity, the thing that made them findable, credible, and real to their customers, and it was about to expire. The husband had forgotten to pay the bill. When he called Newfold’s support line, he reached a member of the escalation team named Andrew. In the background, his wife’s voice could be heard: “I gave you one job. You couldn’t even pay the bill.”
“This is real life,” Puri says. “This can happen to any of us.”
Andrew didn’t follow a script. He called Puri directly. “He said, ‘Do whatever. We’ve got to get their name back.’ The domain was recovered. The business survived. The marriage,” Puri jokes, “had its own challenges and arguments, as husbands and wives do, but the domain wasn’t one of them.”
The story is funny. It is also a precise illustration of why Newfold has made the choices it has. “What would an AI solution have done?” Puri asks. “Ideally, if the technology is right. Probably the wife’s voice would have been in the background noise. But a human will likely understand those nuances far more than an AI would.”
Rather than outright rejection of AI, this position demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of where AI ends and human judgment begins. Newfold uses AI to manage DNS, automate routine support, and accelerate product development. It keeps humans in the loop for the moments that require empathy, context, and the kind of listening that cannot be reduced to a training dataset.
“There are some jobs that AI can automate that make sense and serve customers with more efficiency and expediency,” Puri says. “But when you are in a tricky conversation, you need human empathy and judgement to bring it home.”
Beyond support, Newfold’s human-first philosophy extends to how it thinks about customer success more broadly. The company provides content and training so SMBs can become self-reliant. It also offers professional services, including SEO management, paid media and website builds, for customers who need a little extra help along the way.
“We work towards making it helpful for SMBs to be self-reliant as much as they can,” Puri says. “Whether it is technology, or content, or training, or professional services — whatever we can do so that they can be successful by themselves.”
Iconic Brands, One Forward Bet
There is a version of Newfold’s story that could be told as a cautionary tale: two brands from the early internet, navigating a world that has moved on. Puri tells a different story entirely.
“We are right at the epicenter of where AI and technology is really brewing right now,” he says. “This very moment!”
The transformation happening inside Newfold is a structural one. With close to 90% AI adoption across the company’s R&D organization, the throughput for building and shipping products has increased substantially. Experiences that once took weeks to design, code, and deploy are now live in days.
Puri offers two examples that capture the pace of change.
The first: We wanted to simplify customer product selection by matching the customer’s need with the right VPS product. We used AI to build an entirely new ‘help me choose’ helper widget experience and deployed this to Bluehost.com. What would have taken 4-6 weeks in alignments, discussions, web site design and validation was designed, vibe coded and deployed in three days.
The second: When Hermes — an open-source technology for building AI agents on virtual private servers — was released on GitHub, one of Newfold’s engineers spotted it immediately. “He said, ‘This is a growing wave. People are just building agents on this. We have to make this available.'” Within 48 hours, the technology was integrated, tested, QA’d, and live in the product, with the checkout flow and product page updated to match.
“That velocity is fascinating,” Puri says. “I’ve never seen this in my career before.”
More exciting still is what that velocity makes possible.
Newfold’s legal team has built AI agents to accelerate their work. They have named those agents after their pets, complete with photos and personality descriptions. At a recent all-hands meeting, the legal team presented their agents to the company. “Now we know what Oscar does,” Puri says, laughing. “Oscar likes to sniff everything.”
It is a small detail, but it reveals something important about the culture Puri is building. AI at Newfold is something the teams are discovering, experimenting with, and making their own at every level of the organization, in every function.
“You name the model, and we have access to it,” Puri says. “We have access to pretty much every major frontier model, and we make that available to our team. Because the value we can create and the impact we can have is pretty substantial.”
The transformation extends beyond technology. Newfold is rethinking its business models and rebuilding its brands for a world where the old rules no longer apply. “You have to rebuild your entire brand from the old world to the new world,” Puri says. “So, if you’re a brand person, it’s a fascinating question: how do you evolve and stay relevant?”
These questions are open invitations to the people already inside Newfold, and to the people who might be considering joining.
Why Now Is the Right Time
When asked to make the case for why someone should choose Newfold over a startup or a larger tech company, Puri is direct.
“There is an excitement somebody gets being part of a startup, and I get that,” he says. “If that is somebody’s interest — working with two or three people, really going at something — they should do it.”
But for the person who wants to work on problems that matter at scale, without the uncertainty of a startup, Newfold offers something different.
“We’re a billion-dollar-plus enterprise. We have enough resources to invest in technology and experiences that are going to have a very meaningful impact on a fairly substantial customer base in 200-plus countries.”
More than that, Newfold is in the middle of a transformation. The business model questions are live. The brand questions are live. The technology questions are live. “We are on our transformation path,” Puri says. “If you are someone who wants to be at a company where you want to learn, build, transform, and have a very meaningful impact on a very large set of customers without being bogged down by ‘when is my next round of funding?’, I think this is the place.”
And then there is the culture.
Puri believes that Newfold’s culture is shaped, in a fundamental way, by its customers. When your customers are small business owners – real people with real stakes, real families, real stories – that humanity permeates the organization. It is the natural consequence of spending your days in service of people who are trying to build something that matters.
“Our customers just always keep us human,” Puri says. “They bring the real life, the real world, the real America, the real UK, the real India, the real Latin America, the real Brazil into our world. And it’s not humanly possible not to permeate that into the culture of the organization itself.”
That culture is why Newfold has employees who have been with the company for 10, 15, 25+ years. It is why new people who join eventually become part of what Puri calls “the fabric” of the company.
“You come to work, you get to work on some amazing technology, and you work with some great people who care for you and care for the end customers,” he says. “I think that’s pretty meaningful.”
The Work That Remains
Sachin Puri loves to share in stories and in specific examples drawn from real customers and real employees. He talks about Andrew and the husband and wife who almost lost their domain. He talks about Oscar the legal AI agent. He talks about the product marketer who turned a PDF into an interactive experience in a single day.
All of these examples are part of a thesis: that the most important work in technology is not the work that happens at the frontier, but the work that brings the frontier to the people who need it most.
“Technology creates a level playing field for small and medium businesses,” Puri says. “That has been our belief from the very beginning. We stood by it. We believe in it.”
At Newfold, that belief takes shape as a forward-looking investment in two brands that helped build the internet, in a team that is reinventing what those brands can do, and in the millions of small businesses around the world who are counting on them to get it right.
“We are growing our team, transforming our brands, and transforming our technology while our customers are transforming,” Puri says.”
“The next decade of technology hasn’t been invented yet. That’s the exciting part. Every generation believes they’ve reached the pinnacle of innovation, and every generation is proven wrong. The most important skill isn’t just mastering today’s technology. It’s developing the curiosity to keep learning, the ability to recognize patterns, and the courage to adapt as the world changes. That’s true for our customers, our employees, and for us as leaders.”
Sachin Puri is the CEO of Bluehost Group and Network Solutions Group, part of the Newfold Digital portfolio of brands. Newfold Digital serves more than 6 million customers across 200-plus countries, helping small and medium-sized businesses build, manage, and grow their online presence.
