President, COO. Non-tech business. Running companies with AI agents, not slides. Atlanta
Atlanta, GA
Joined March 2009
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The best question boards should ask management in 2026:
“Where does AI show up in the P&L?”
If the only thing they can point to is AI spend, something is broken.
In our business, it shows up in all three:
• Revenue: an AI-assisted website rebuild now generating sales at 4x the pace of the prior site
• Margin: higher gross margins from AI-assisted pricing architecture
• Productivity: dramatically lower merchandising costs while maintaining output
Every company should be able to point to measurable P&L impact from AI by now.
I mean that literally.
The number of times per day that I tell Claude "Always Allow" is insanely annoying.
I'm the monkey trying to use a hammer.
Jay Allen retweeted
Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote.
thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
This is exactly how I feel. All day is decisions and task switching. It’s mentally exhausting.
AI was supposed to make us work less
I've never been this tired in my life
most days I have up to 10 agents running at the same time. one fixing a bug, one writing pages, one refactoring something I already forgot I asked for, 3 other I have no idea what they are doing but i suppose i ask it?
and I jump from conversation to conversation all day
compared to 5 years ago, I probably context switch 100x more
by the end of the day my brain is fried. completely toasted. nothing left, not even for the people I love
I call it the fried brain effect
thought it was just me but almost every founder I talk to lately says the exact same thing
we got superpowers, and somehow the pressure only went up. if you can ship 10x more, you feel like you have to ship 10x more. every single day
I don't have a solution
honestly I have no idea where this goes from here
anyone else feeling this?
AI is becoming the company operating system, not a set of tools.
The firms that treat it that way will pull ahead. Hierarchy flattens. Small expert teams directing agents will outperform large traditional structures. The advantage will concentrate with whoever owns clean systems and readable data.
That’s why we’re deep in an ERP update—getting every core process captured and structured so the data is actually usable by future systems.
By the end of 2026 I expect the smartest employees in most companies will be AI tools. The ones who prepared their data and processes will be the ones who can actually use them.
I opened my first ecommerce site in the 1990s. Been in it since the beginning.
I now think human shopping on the internet is ending.
Scouring sites for the right product was always a bad experience. An assistant that already knows the job, the constraints, and the budget is a better shopper than a search bar. ChatGPTs Intelligent UI is a better way to shop.
IRL stores stay. The browser session dies.
Build the catalog for the agent. Specs, availability, price, and a checkout it can finish. That is the new storefront. Stop copying Amazon. They optimized the old game. (And they are making a mistake in banning bots).
How much of your company processes that you can actually hand to AI determines how much faster you can move than everyone else.
More processes on AI means more throughput, more experiments, and more decisions per week. Any competitor still doing that work by hand is already behind.
Speed is the advantage. AI sets the speed.
And we are in the final stages before AI first companies really leave others in the dust.
Heads up! Nest Protect goes from a smoke detector to the single most annoying device you’ve ever owned at five years old.
Who thought a constant alert was a good idea? Never again, Nest. Never again.
AI just revived an acquisition that died two years ago.
The company was on old software. They couldn’t pull the data we needed for diligence, and they didn’t have the bandwidth to build it. Deal died.
Same company, same systems, deal is back. AI pulled and cleaned the data. In a non-tech category, that used to be a real blocker.
We’re underestimating how many acquisitions will close now because both sides can use AI to get through diligence and analysis fast.
As a longtime digital marketer, I ignored the “email is dead” crowd for years. They were wrong. Email kept working.
This week I didn’t open my inbox once. It’s a junk mailbox. My AI pulled the messages that mattered and replied to them directly.
Consumer email might actually be dying. Not yet. Soon.
Business email still works. The open web might be next. The times, they are a changing.
I read a lot of books. The median American read 2 books last year. 40% read zero.
Books are still the densest form of learning available. A good nonfiction book is months of research, argument, and editing compressed into something you can finish in a week.
Most people won’t do that work. That’s the advantage.
Read daily. Especially nonfiction. It compounds your advantage in a way that is hard to replicate.
LinkedIn is almost unusable. Hasn’t improved in the last five years. And now it’s 99% AI Slop and fake jobs.
We are finally able to rebuild our company roles around AI first processes.
Procurement no longer plans or creates POs. They approve them. Marketing plans, campaigns and content are AI first with a light human overhaul and approval. Accounting just looks at the exception report. The human owns the exception and the fix, but the agent owns the first 80%.
It is a dramatic change on the P&L.
This is the first time I’ve seen the productivity show up in the org chart of a non-tech company, not in a demo. We are early. The next wave is coming now.
I now spend ~75% of my day in Claude or ChatGPT and 25% on calls.
A year ago it was the reverse. The difference is hard to overstate. 🧵
The constraint shifted.
Tools are no longer the drag. People in the process are. Especially anyone whose default is still “let’s get aligned on that Thursday.” (Not AI first)
