What this is

Every week, someone is told that AI is going to transform their business. Sometimes that's true. More often, the real problem is a process nobody has looked at in ten years.

This is a weekly note about that gap — between what automation is sold as, and what it actually does inside a working business.

What you'll find here

• Plain explanations of tools and techniques, with the trade-offs left in.
• What we're seeing in the field: what's working, what isn't, and what it costs.
• The occasional case where the right answer is don't automate this.

What you won't find

No hype. No slide decks. Nothing that assumes you already speak the language.

We've spent decades going into businesses and finding the one place everything backs up behind. Usually it isn't where anyone expected, and usually the fix is smaller than the pitch.

If your best people are doing work a machine could do, that's the problem worth solving. We'll write about how.