Field notes on the part after the demo: source data, operational workflows, approval gates, audit logs, employee adoption, and the cost of producing and delivering the product or service.
Six production systems, one public pet project, and one operating principle: AI handles persistence and volume, humans approve what matters, and every action stays auditable.
Owners, COO/CFO leaders, and teams responsible for real workflows and P&L.
Finance, analytics, legal, estimating, construction, operations, and compliance.
Named systems, explicit controls, public data, and source-level receipts.
A production AI system needs source data, validation, approval gates, and an audit trail built around how a product or service is delivered.
Marco is an outbound AI agent that begins with sender health, deliverability gates, and signals before it writes a message.
Hunter runs persistent PPC operations across Google and Microsoft Ads, but meaningful changes stay governed by written rules and human approval.
Oscar is a self-hosted YouTube operations agent that turns analytics, SEO, captions, and channel tools into a plain-language interface.
InspectPilot pairs inspection scheduling with a compliance engine built on roughly 11 million Los Angeles inspection records over 13 years.
A field note on replacing selected SaaS tools with self-hosted systems, where ownership saves money, and where it creates new operating costs.
Behind the Watt is an open evidence database that uses AI to extract claims from public records while preserving source-level provenance and human approval.
A production pattern for AI systems: let software handle persistence and volume, keep consequential decisions with people, and log every action.