That's not a strategy. That's a vibe. Been on a lot of calls and DMs the last few weeks. Founders building in AI. Some funded, some bootstrapped, some solo. Different stacks, different verticals. Same conversation underneath all of them. Two things I can't unsee. One. "AI" still means ChatGPT with a system prompt. I ask what they actually run internally. The deck says agentic everything. The reality is a Google Doc, an SDR they're about to hire, and Apollo. That's it. The product pitch is 2026. The ops are 2023. If your own back office still runs on copy paste and good intentions, you are not selling AI. You are selling a logo. Two. The knowledge is bubble shaped. They know their model, their stack, their wrapper, their corner of Twitter. They have no clue what large corporates are quietly shipping in compliance, finance, sales ops, back office. The bubble feels safe because everyone in it is reading the same five Substacks and nodding at each other. I sat inside those corporates for 20 years. Three quick examples so this isn't abstract. - A bank reads every new FCA update with an internal agent, maps it to the relevant policy docs, drafts the gap analysis, pings the compliance lead with a one page summary. Used to be three people, two weeks. Now one person, half a day. - An accounts payable team rebuilt itself around an agent that reconciles invoices against POs, flags the mismatches, drafts the supplier email, queues it for human send. Fourteen people went to three plus the agent. - A tier one sales ops team has an agent reading every won and lost deal in Salesforce, pulling the call recordings, updating the playbook every Friday. Reps had stopped using the old playbook because it was always six months out of date. Now it's never more than a week behind. None of this is on LinkedIn. None of it is in a press release. It just shows up in cost lines two quarters later, and in the headcount slide nobody sends to the all hands. Here is the part most founders don't want to hear.

I completed day 7 of the AIS Challenge. I built an executive assistant to perform the following tasks: create a 7-day meal plan based on weekly macro/calorie goals, then produces a categorized grocery list based on those meals. I created a skill called meal-planner to generate a meal plan for breakfast, lunch, dinner and 1 snack. With this skill, I tell it to generate the meals and grocery list based on the types of foods I eat and produce total macros for each day along with the following: total grams of protein, fats, and carbs. This was a fun challenge,