There Are No AI Wins Without Understanding the Business
Automatable processes and reachable data come first. Everything else is theater.
Every week another agency posts about AI. Very few of them ship anything with a return attached. The uncomfortable part is that most companies aren’t ready for what’s being sold to them: their processes aren’t automatable, and their data isn’t reachable. Point a model at that and you get a demo, not a dividend.
You cannot shortcut this with tooling. You cannot learn an industry like mortgage in a few months, and no amount of model access substitutes for having sat in the room and understood how the money actually moves. The idea that a few people with fresh accounts can deliver deep value in a quarter is, bluntly, wrong.
The work starts before the technology. Understand the business completely — the workflows, the constraints, the data, the incentives — and only then build the thing that makes sense for that specific business. The order is not negotiable.
This is a stub for the repositioned site — full essay to come.