Ideas, insights, and opinion on technology for small business.
Every product now says 'AI', and the label tells you nothing about whether it can actually change how your business runs. There's a five-minute demo test that sorts the real thing from a chatbot bolted onto last year's software.
One founder we audited was sure he ran fifteen tools. The real number was forty-one. Your stack grew by accident, and the first step to taking control is a map, not a purge.
Would your business still function if OpenAI went dark tomorrow? Most founders can't answer that with confidence. Here's the audit that surfaces it.
When two founders say they 'use AI in the business', one may be pasting into ChatGPT and the other may have it wired into their pipeline. Same technology, very different dependency.
Every SaaS tool you pay for is quietly shipping AI features by default. You didn't procure them, you can't cleanly turn them off, and your team is now building workflows around them.
Anthropic released Fable this week; it's good news for current users. It also exposes a dependency every UK business on a frontier model should already be planning around.
