What is actually happening in AI, and what it changes for a business the size of yours. Written to a standing brief, checked before it ships, and sourced so you can go verify it yourself. Search it, filter it, argue with it.
Practical guidance for starting with AI, using it responsibly, and knowing when to check its work.
21 articles matching / latest 22 Sept 2026
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
A recurring management report does three separate jobs: it pulls numbers, it computes them, and it explains them. Only one of those is an AI job, and Microsoft retiring a spreadsheet function on the fourteenth is a useful reminder of which one.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The ops lead left in July and the Monday invoice chase stopped in August, quietly, with no error and no alert. The handover doc was never the deliverable. The list of what runs under their name was, and three of the four platforms you use will not tell you it exists.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
Twelve people on a paid AI workspace runs about $2,880 a year. Twelve people on their own logins runs zero, and what that zero buys is a set of data terms somebody on your payroll agreed to on their phone.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The automation platform you stood up on a twelve dollar server to kill a Zapier bill is probably not open source. The clause that decides whether your setup is legal is about who you run it for, not where you run it.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
A fifty thousand dollar seat just opened and somebody has already told you not to fill it. The evidence that AI is eating entry-level jobs is real, it is specific, and it is measuring a company that is not yours.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
Two shops quoted the same spreadsheet-to-app job at four thousand dollars and forty thousand dollars. Neither one was lying. The spread is a measurement of how much you did not tell them, and it is the only number in the transaction you actually control.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
A free trial hands you the software and none of your data, and your data is the only part that was ever in question. Here is the two-hour test to run before you open the trial, and the one number that decides the purchase.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The automation has been parked since February because somebody said the CRM has to be clean first. It reads four fields and touches about three thousand records. The cleanup that actually gates it is an afternoon, and the four-week version was never going to hold anyway.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The plumbing that lets an AI agent spend your company's money unattended is now a versioned spec with sixty payment companies behind it. The rule about who eats a bad purchase is not written yet, and the protocol's own documentation says so in plain language.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The email is drafted. Everyone is expected to be using AI by October, and yes, we will ask about it at review time. Send it and a number comes back. The number is wrong, and now it lives in a personnel file.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
The six-step flow that has handled every inbound lead for two years costs about two thousand tasks a month and never surprises you. Every vendor now wants you to rebuild it as an agent. The test for whether you should is one sentence long, and the vendors published it themselves.
Foundational AI: Do's and Don'ts
Three renewals this quarter, three new AI lines, priced anywhere from twenty nine dollars flat to a hundred and twenty five per seat. Which ones to pay for has almost nothing to do with how good the AI is.
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