Essays, playbooks, and measured findings on building with AI, running agencies, and how work actually gets done - plus personal stories and the opinions I will defend. Much of it published here first, and all of it open.
I make my living building AI automations. This piece is about the ones I refuse to build - which turns out to be the more useful list. In recent surveys, 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives. Those projects weren't killed by bad technology. The failures were structural.
For twenty-five years I did one thing under different titles: before anything could be built, somebody had to figure out what it was supposed to be. We called it scoping, briefing, judgment, experience - we never had a clean name for it. Then AI made the skill visible, and it turned out to be the one that matters most.
One of the strange things about running a young agency is that the cost of saying no to a client is always concrete, and the cost of saying yes is always diffuse. Young agencies are not bad at saying no because they lack character - they do not yet have the operating system that makes saying no obvious. I learned this the slow way, on a project that almost ended my agency in its first year.
I currently work around 60 hours a week, more than I ever did running my digital agency, and I am less tired than I was at 40. That sounds like a paradox until you realise what changed: I stopped working Monday-to-Friday. The five-day week is the most expensive habit in knowledge work, and most employers have no idea what it is costing them.
I write regularly on LinkedIn about what I'm building and learning: agency growth, AI development, product judgment, and the messy reality behind making things work.
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