Thinking
What we’re learning, written down.
Essays and explainers from building AI inside American industrial companies. Plain words, sources linked.
AI doesn’t need a data cleanup first. It needs your best people’s rules.
Owners are told to clean up their data or replace the ERP before AI can work. Most of what’s missing is the rules their best people apply when two systems disagree.
Generated screens will swallow the software you only look at
For forty years companies have bent to fit their software. Screens are getting cheap to generate, and companies are still signing multi-year contracts for them.
Hire the AI engineer third
A lot of owners start on AI with a hire. Make it the third move, after an owner in operations and one written question. A tool of ours that stumbled on a leader’s first questions showed us why.
Don’t build agents. Build self-improving skills.
ChatGPT and Claude now ship their own agents. Each one still wakes up without knowing how your shop runs, and what it reads when it does is the part worth building.