What we’re learning.
Notes, numbers, and hard-won lessons from helping small and medium-sized businesses actually put AI to work. No think-pieces, no vendor takes — just what the math said after we ran it.
The median company spends $11.38 a month on AI. You can beat that this afternoon.
The median American business spends $11.38 per employee per month on AI. That figure comes straight from the Ramp AI Index for June 2026, built on actual card and bill-pay...
The most powerful AI model of 2026 got pulled offline. Your month-end close still takes four days.
Both of those things are true right now, and only one of them should change how you run your business this quarter. There’s a story all over the news that’s...
Bolt a motor to a line shaft and you’ve still got a line shaft
Paul David's 1990 paper explains why electricity took 40 years to show up in productivity statistics: factories bolted motors onto steam-era line shafts. AI seats on unchanged workflows repeat the mistake.
Your job was never typing
Jensen Huang says the task of your job and the purpose of your job are not the same. For SMB operators, that's the difference between losing your week to typing and getting it back.
Cuban’s right. The AI bill is for the workflow you never rebuilt.
Mark Cuban on Big Technology Podcast: F500s waste money on AI because they're running the business the way they always have. ROI comes from rebuilding the workflow on AI — not bolting AI on the old one. SMBs have the asymmetric advantage.
Ken Griffin Went Home Fairly Depressed
Ken Griffin called AI "garbage" at Davos in January 2026. Four months later at Stanford GSB, the $50B Citadel founder came home "fairly depressed" because AI agents now do in hours what his PhD finance team does in months. The reversal is the story.
You can just decide to be AI-native
Part II of our “you can just do things series.” You can decide today. You don’t need a 90-day roadmap, a steering committee, or a transformation consultant in a quarter-zip....
You can just install Claude Code tonight
You don't need a steering committee to use AI. Twenty dollars, one evening, and one workflow gets you further than a 90-day evaluation.
Three Hard Truths About AI Application
The Axios HQ 2026 State of Workplace Communication report, applied to SMB operators. Three hard truths about AI: leaders are wrong about adoption, training is the moat, and AI amplifies existing dysfunction.
The Handloom Weaver Was the Call-Center Rep of 1820
Every general-purpose technology of the last 250 years arrived with the same forecast. Every single one. And the aggregate result, every single time, was higher output, higher wages, and more jobs in categories nobody had a name for yet.