Behind on AI After 99 Episodes: He Came Home with a Plan. I Came Home with a Question.

Episode notes

What this conversation covers

Ninety-nine episodes of telling business owners to build theengine. Then we got on a plane.

Kim and Hal spent three days in Venice Beach, California with a group of engineers and mathematicians who build AI-native operating systems for a living. They sat in the same rooms, watched the same demonstrations, and flew home on the same red-eye. He came home with a task list. She came home with a question.

At dinner one night, a mathematician mentioned that his AIagent was building something on Kim's laptop, back in the hotel room, right then. She went back and opened it. Same desktop. Same icons. Nothing running. Not even a spinning circle. Hal heard that same sentence and it was the greatest news of the trip.

This is the honest version of the hundredth episode, including the part where Kim names the title she promised on episode 98 and could not keep. It ends where Hal accidentally started it: with a job description, one page per person, free, and available Monday morning.

In this Episode

• The hotel room, the laptop, and the completelyordinary explanation for why nothing was on the screen.

• Why Kim was watching the screen and Hal waswatching the people, and what he saw that she missed.
• Context rot, front matter, and why the unglamorous thing turned out to be the foundation.
• Hal's admission: I didn't understand anything. I just kept going with it.

Ready to Take Action

• Watch what an AI-native agency looks like from the inside: https://AskLewisHoward.com
• Small Business Big AI:https://smallbusinessbigai.com/
• Kim Lewis Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-lewis-howard/
• Hal Howard on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/halhoward/

---Q: Where should a small business start with AI?

A: Not with a tool. Start by writing a one-page job descriptionfor every person in the business, describing what they actually do all day rather than what the org chart says. Put four questions on the page: what this person touches every single day, what they do once a week and dread, what only they know how to do that nobody else could pick up tomorrow morning, and what they get asked over and over that they wish they never got asked again. That last one is usually where the money is. This costs nothing, requires no software, and can start Monday with a legal pad. It matters because you cannothand an AI system a knowledge base, a context graph, or a set of instructions until somebody has written down what actually happens inside your business. The documentation is not a prerequisite to the AI project. It is the AI project's first deliverable.

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MUSIC & SOUND CREDITS

Music: "I Am with You" by Dream Cave; Epidemic Sound via iStock.com

Sound Effects: https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/