I Tried to Replace Myself with AI. The AI Was the Easy Part.

Everyone's talking about what AI can do. Almost nobody talks about what breaks when you actually try to run a business on it.

I've spent the past year rebuilding my consulting practice on AI. Not one tool, not one workflow. The whole operational layer. And the problems worth talking about were never the AI. They were the detection system I had to build to stop my own content pipeline from publishing things that sound like a robot wrote them. The three-day silent outage caused by a renamed folder. The moment I tried to turn my sales instincts into a scoring model and realized I couldn't explain how I actually make decisions.

This is a walk through the real system: what it looks like, what it costs, what I broke building it, and the one insight that turned out to matter more than any tool I plugged in. You'll see the actual architecture, the actual banned word list, and an honest split of what I'd never do manually again versus what I gave back to the humans.

• All levels
• AI/ML