Everyone says “add AI to your business.” Almost nobody says where. Here is where, measured from products I run.
When I open up any system I have built, every moving part is one of three things. Knowing which is which is the entire discipline. It is also most of what I would bring to yours.
The vast majority of any system, including an AI-native one. Payments, schedules, records, rules. Testable, repeatable, near-zero cost to run. Boring on purpose.
Judgement rewritten as equations: relevance as distance, demand as decay, performance as statistics. Objective, instant, and it gives the same answer every time.
The scarce ingredient. Language and judgement where they are genuinely the product. Used surgically, guarded well, and never trusted with a job that maths or code can do.
Tention turns world news into personal filming prompts for busy professionals. Watch a single story travel from the wire to a user’s phone, and count how rarely a model is allowed to touch it. Tap any step for the why.
Eight steps. Two model calls: the cheap classifier, and one premium writer that is cached, tap-gated and budget-capped. Everything else is code and maths that cannot hallucinate and costs next to nothing to re-run. That ratio is not an accident. It is the design.
Here is the part that should interest a business owner most. None of these equations came from a data-science team, and honestly, not all of them came from me. I described the outcome I needed in plain English and directed Claude until the machinery existed, behaved, and was calibrated against real examples. AI’s quietest superpower is designing the systems that replace it.
Meaning mapped to geometry, with one calibrated threshold deciding what serves. It replaces a model’s opinion: slower, priced per ask, and different every time you ask it.
A half-life curve quietly retires topics nobody touches, and the polling schedule follows it. It replaces a human deciding what is still worth watching, which in practice means nobody deciding.
Creators in Tention are scored only against their own history: a baseline, a spread, a curve mapping to a number. It replaces vanity metrics: comparing a physiotherapist’s reach to a footballer’s.
Which style of question suits each user is decided by a bandit algorithm, a running tally that sharpens with every film or skip. It replaces guesswork A/B tests, and it costs nothing to run.
This is what AI makes newly affordable: not chat, but bespoke computational reasoning. Objective answers, from your own data, to questions that used to need a research budget. The model designs the equation once. The equation then runs forever, at no cost, and never makes anything up.
Models hallucinate and models cost money. Neither is a reason to avoid them. Both are reasons to engineer around them. Five rules from inside Tention, all enforced in code rather than in good intentions.
Tention publishes quotes from what users actually said on camera. The model choosing a quote is only allowed to return positions, numbered locations in the user’s own transcript. Pure code slices the words out. The published string is always theirs, because no component that could invent words is ever in a position to produce it.
Every model call made on a user’s behalf sits behind a deliberate tap. The one user-facing check that once fired automatically was removed from the schedule, and a test now asserts it stays removed. Consent is a screen, not a checkbox in settings.
Spend is counted before a call, not discovered on an invoice. The premium paths are built to refuse at their cap rather than run on. The written rule: unbounded premium-model spend is worse than a feature being briefly unavailable.
Premium models are spent where humans see the result. Cheap fast models do the internal sorting. The single most expensive model in the system runs once per change to a creator’s brand guidelines, and its answer is reused ever after.
Each model call writes a telemetry row: tokens, cost, latency, retries, errors. What it never writes is the content itself. The logging system cannot leak a transcript, because content fields are simply not on its allowlist.
Heirloom Prints is a premium framed-print store: a visual product configurator, Stripe checkout, a full order lifecycle with automated invoicing, a commission ledger for partner photographers, transactional email, and an admin back office.
Every part of it is deterministic. Payment confirmation is an idempotent transaction that retries safely. Shipping is rules. Margins and commissions are arithmetic with a 90-day hold. Nothing in a checkout should be creative.
And yet AI built nearly all of it, under direction, the same way it built Tention. That is the finding most businesses miss: the most valuable AI in this company finished its work before launch. If your operation runs on spreadsheets and swivel-chair admin, your biggest AI win is probably AI-built software, not AI-run software.
This is the consulting work I am beginning to take on: sitting inside a business, mapping how it actually operates, and placing AI only where it earns its keep. Three questions I would bring on day one: