An AI mistake just reached a customer. What you do in the first hour
An automated quote goes out at 10:40 on a Tuesday. The price is wrong by a factor of ten. A customer has already opened it.
Automation¶
What not to automate, and how to tell a real boundary from an excuse
A 40-person logistics firm wanted to automate its customer complaint responses. The volume was there. Around 30 a month, all arriving by email, all needing a reply inside a day. On paper it was a clean candidate.
AI is an operations tool before it is a developer tool
AI sounds like a developer tool. Read the coverage and you would think the whole point of it is shipping code faster.
From SOP to automation: the smallest workflow worth shipping this week
Most teams stall at the same place. They have written the procedure, but the procedure still runs on a person.
Prompt vs. procedure: turning one-off AI requests into repeatable team workflows
A clever prompt produces one good answer. A procedure produces the same good answer every week, run by anyone on your team.
Writing for agents: SOPs your AI can actually run
Series: Building an AI-Ready Business — Part 2 of 3 Part 1: Process problem · Part 2: Writing SOPs · Part 3: Decision logs · Series hub
Most teams treat their SOPs as if they are ready to hand to an AI agent. They are not.
The first 30 days as an AI champion: what to actually do
The AI champion sounds like a tools job. New software. New dashboards. New vendor calls. It is not.
Most SMBs don't have an AI problem: they have a process problem
Series: Building an AI-Ready Business — Part 1 of 3 Part 1: Process problem · Part 2: Writing SOPs · Part 3: Decision logs · Series hub
AI is on every SMB owner's agenda right now, and the spend is climbing. What is missing is a quieter conversation about whether the work AI is meant to improve was ever stable enough to improve in the first place.
The first post on this blog wasn't written by me
Most of what gets called "AI automation" is a single prompt and a reply. That is a chatbot. A real pipeline has structure: discrete steps, quality checks, and a human at the end before anything ships.
How to Use AI to Triage Your Inbox Without Losing Control
Email is one of the highest-friction parts of running a small business. It is also one of the most practical places to introduce AI — not to fully automate your inbox, but to reduce the time you spend sorting, categorizing, and drafting responses.