Let's get to know each other! Comment below sharing where you are in the world, a career goal you have, and something you like to do for fun. 😊

Hey everyone here is my introduction (again with more context): 20+ years in performance improvement. 5 months into AI and automation. That combination is why I'm here. My name is Chris Sharkey. I run Sharkitect Digital out of Kansas City. Most people in the AI space sell automations. I don't. I sell an AI Transformation Partnership — built around one mission: helping small businesses understand, trust, and actually implement AI into their operations. Not by handing them tools. By diagnosing their systems and solving at the root. Good doctors don't write prescriptions the second you walk in. They diagnose first. That's the model. Three months ago I started applying this with real clients. First engagement: a construction company that reached out for a completely different project. I sat with them. Ran the diagnosis. Mapped their workflow end to end. What they called for wasn't the real problem. It was a problem — just not the one bleeding them out. Once I showed them what was actually happening, it was clear: they were spending 80–100 hours every week doing nothing but manually moving data from one place to another. By hand. 35 minutes per estimate. Calculation errors costing them real bids. They didn't fully realize how much it was costing them until we put it on paper. So I built the solution around how they already work. No new system to learn. No process overhaul. It adapted to them — not the other way around. Training took less than two hours. Adoption was immediate. 35 minutes → 30 seconds. They're saving $104K–$156K annually in labor alone. That's the original project they called about? Still on the list. Just no longer a priority. Within the first month, they saw the shift. We're now working on two additional projects together — each one targeting a different operational bottleneck. None of it is built in isolation. Every system is designed to stack, integrate, compound, and scale. Each build talks to the last. The business gets smarter with every layer, not just bigger.

After a while you'll reach a point where you might want to go down the agency route. The only issue? I've run into too many businesses that don't want to work with me if I operate an agency. Every single time they've said that, I found it kind of weird because I didn't fully understand the problem. But after doing some digging I figured it out. What seems to happen when a business works with an agency: - The response time from the agency starts to get slower and slower - The person in charge is not the most skilled, but the cheapest person to manage the system - When the system breaks it takes forever to fix it And the agency has multiple clients to juggle, so they can't put all of their attention on one single business. But as a freelancer you could probably handle 5 clients at the same time and make it work. So it raises the question, when should you go from one person to an agency? For me, I'll skip the agency path. I can manage between 3 to 5 clients easily without any extra help. And if I have too many clients, I'd rather raise my prices and have fewer, which is what I've been doing. From my experience, 5 clients at $2k to $5k each is something I can manage. And most businesses rarely need help 24/7. What about you? Does the agency route seem interesting, or would you rather stay a solo freelancer?

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PhD student facing dissertation deadline in 4 months. Literature review: 6 months behind schedule already. Required comprehensive review of 200+ academic papers. Extract methodology, findings, limitations from each. Synthesize into coherent narrative demonstrating research gap. Manual approach: Read each paper carefully (45 minutes average), take detailed notes, extract relevant quotes, log complete citations properly. Estimated total time: 120+ hours minimum for thorough review. Current progress after 2 months of dedicated work: 34 papers fully reviewed, 166 still remaining. At current pace: 8 additional months needed to complete. Critical problem: Dissertation defense scheduled in exactly 4 months. Advisor already expressing serious concern about timeline viability. She paid me $1,800 to build academic paper processing system that could accelerate this dramatically. System functionality: Upload research paper PDF → Automatically extract key structured terms (title, authors, publication year, methodology type, sample size, key findings, stated limitations) → Generate concise one-paragraph summary → Auto-tag by research method category → Create fully searchable database. Processing time per paper: 3 minutes average versus 45 minutes manual reading and note-taking. Implementation timeline: Weekend 1 system development and testing. Weeks 1-3 systematically processed 247 papers (discovered more relevant papers than originally planned during search expansion). Total project time including setup: 22 hours from start to complete database. Result: Comprehensive literature review completed in 3 weeks instead of projected 8 additional months. Unexpected powerful benefit: Searchable database enabled sophisticated pattern analysis completely impossible with manual approach. Methodology breakdown became instantly visible: 87 studies used surveys, 34 used interviews, 18 used mixed methods. Critical research gap identification emerged from simple database queries that would have required weeks of manual cross-referencing and analysis.