Feels like every second post is med spas and real estate. Meanwhile I’m over here building stuff for: • Bike shops • Kids Book creators • Supplement brands • AI receptionists for fireplace companies Is it just me or is the real world random AF! 😂

I sat down with Devin Kearns, co-founder & CEO of Custom AI Studio, to break down what it actually takes to build an AI agency with real enterprise value, not just another lifestyle business. We get into why most AI work being sold today won't survive 2027, why the mid-market is the prime opportunity (not SMBs or enterprises), the 11 ways AI experts are actually making money right now, how to position with frameworks instead of being just another vendor, and the five things Devin wishes he knew sooner. If you're building, running, or thinking about starting an AI agency, this is the strategic conversation I wish I'd had two years ago.

Everyone here is building voice agents and cold email machines. Cool stuff, genuinely. But I run AI across a few retail companies, and if I'm honest, none of the flashy things are what moved the needle. The boring back-office automations did. Here's what actually paid off: 🧾 Invoice reading. Every supplier sends a different layout, someone used to key them in by hand. Now a GPT pulls the data clean. Hours back every week. 📦 Reorder flags. A simple system that watches stock levels and tells me what to reorder before I run out. Boring. Saved me from dead stock and empty shelves both. 📊 The "what changed this week" report. Every Monday I get a plain-English summary of what moved in the business. No dashboard diving. Took an afternoon to build, I read it every single week. None of this is sexy. Nobody's making a YouTube thumbnail about invoice parsing. But it runs quietly in the background and saves real time and money, which is the whole point. My take: if you're selling to business owners, sell them the boring stuff first. It's easier to build, it works, and once they trust you with the unglamorous wins they'll let you build the cool things later. What's the most boring automation that's quietly saving you the most? 👇

So I'm sure you guys have heard the term "AI slop", and everyone sorta defines it differently. Maybe you think it's those TikToks of AI-generated fruits going on dates. Maybe it's infographics with misspelled words. Maybe it's something else entirely. But I want to talk about it in the context of communication. Internal, external, content you put out into the world. I write my LinkedIn posts with AI. My agent knows my business, how I write, how I speak. That's just how I work now. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think everyone should be using AI to write if it makes them more efficient. But this isn't a binary yes or no. It's a spectrum. Sometimes AI can draft and send automatically. Most of the time, I want it to just draft. Then I review. If someone sends me an email with em dashes everywhere, I don't actually care at all that they used AI. The fact that I can clearly tell it's AI-generated isn't the problem. What I do start asking is: → Did they proofread this? → Is this completely accurate? And subconsciously, I might start losing trust. Not just in the email but in the person who sent it. Our job here has changed from writer to reviewer. This quote has really stuck with me: "You can outsource your thinking, but you can never outsource your understanding." When your name is attached to the content, you take credit if it lands, as you should. But that also means you need to take accountability if it's incorrect. Taste and reviewing are becoming more important than ever. AI is super intelligent and powerful, but I don't want to see a world where we trust AI so much, that we stop reviewing things, and then the human on the other end of the content starts losing trust in us. That's why even though I write with AI, and people know that, I still try my best to disguise it and make it sound as "Nate" as possible. Check out the LinkedIn post I just wrote about this HERE

Google I/O basically reminded me that “keeping up with AI” is not a learning strategy anymore. It’s cardio. 😅 Gemini updates, new coding tools, AGI talk, agents everywhere… and somehow my biggest breakthrough this week is still: pick one boring workflow and actually build it. 🦾 Curious: what’s the ONE AI thing you’re building or testing this week?