Insights & Updates
Thoughts on AI agents, automation strategies, and building production-grade AI systems.
The Technical Debt Trap: Why Your AI Team Can't Deploy
42% of companies abandoned their AI initiatives in 2025, up from just 17% in 2024. The problem isn't the AI—it's the technical debt that compounds at 23% monthly. Three debt traps block deployment: versioning chaos where teams can't identify what's running in production, data pipeline decay where 67% of RAG systems degrade within 90 days, and runtime chaos where teams lack the observability needed to ship safely. MIT research shows only 5% of AI pilots deliver measurable ROI, while RAND confirms 80% of AI projects fail—double the rate of traditional software. The gap between demo and production isn't technical sophistication, it's operational discipline. Learn the 4-phase recovery plan and the three questions that determine if you're ready to ship.
The $16 Million AI Tool That Never Launched
The engineering lead pulled up the spreadsheet. We'd been building this AI meeting prep tool for six months. The product worked. Beta users loved it. The team was excited. Then we saw the annual cost projection: $16 million. For a product that saved people 15 minutes before meetings. Nice to have, not must-have. We killed it that afternoon. Six months of work, shelved in a single meeting. And you know what? That was the right call. RAND Corporation found that 80% of AI projects fail—twice the rate of regular IT projects. After working on three AI products that failed in completely different ways, I started seeing the patterns. The expensive patterns nobody talks about until after the project is dead. Here's what actually kills AI products (and the checklist that could have saved all three).
Your AI Project Has Been "Almost Ready" for Six Months. Here's What That's Actually Costing You.
Your AI product has been "90% done" for months. Here's the real cost: $480K in burn, lost market position, and competitors capturing your customers. Time to ship.
How AI Agents Save Time
AI won’t magically do your whole job. But an AI agent can absolutely kill the time-wasters—summarizing threads, pulling context, drafting replies, and turning messy notes into clean next steps.