Notes on AI designed for small business.

Short, honest pieces on AI for small businesses. What to try, what to skip, and how to tell the difference.

Cost · Guides
Not every task needs the biggest model
Every time a new frontier model lands, someone proposes plumbing it everywhere. The right answer isn't a smaller model. It's a test.
James Dodd11 Apr 20264 min read
Fieldnotes · Framing
Explain it with something they know
Put a new idea next to a familiar one and the decision gets easier. Most of the work of a good briefing is choosing the thing on the other side of the comparison.
James Dodd8 Apr 20263 min read
Case studies · Framing
Worth looking again
A developer who'd written off AI coding tools watched one sweep up bugs the team had chased for months. The lesson wasn't about the tool. It was about second chances.
James Dodd4 Apr 20263 min read
Guides · Oversight
The three buckets of AI exposure
Every company thinks it knows what its AI exposure is. Most have mapped the smallest part of it.
James Dodd30 Mar 20264 min read
Case studies · Reliability
Two out of three is bad
A free document comparison tool had been quietly hallucinating for a year inside one of our clients. Nobody had noticed, because most of the time it looked fine.
James Dodd24 Mar 20264 min read
Agents · Case studies
We built one AI to commit fraud and another to stop it
Both agents found a way. Neither was broken. That was the problem, and it taught us where AI earns its keep and where it doesn't.
James Dodd17 Mar 20267 min read
Case studies · Oversight
Free is never quite free
A free document tool we found inside a client had two problems. One was hallucination. The other was where the files went when you clicked the button.
James Dodd9 Mar 20263 min read
Guides · Restraint
Five ways to use less AI
Most SMBs have more AI running in their business than they realise, and could shrink it considerably without losing anything they valued.
James Dodd28 Feb 20263 min read