AI operations insights from a senior technology and operations leader learning by doing, not just reading. No hype. No jargon. Just honest takes from someone navigating this alongside you.
There's a version of the AI story that goes like this: learn the tools, ship a side project, maybe start a consultancy. But something shifted this month. The lab work moved into the living room. My wife and I launched Tiny Village — a parent support platform for Calgary families with kids under five. It's not a technology project that happens to involve my family. It's a family project that happens to use AI. My wife brings the hospitality background, the lived mom experience, and the instinct for making people feel welcomed. I bring the AI architecture habit. Together, we're building the thing we wish existed. AI in Tiny Village is invisible by design. It's the operating leverage that makes a two-person family project feel like a small team — content drafting, resource curation, research, newsletters, and the hundred small things that would otherwise eat the 45 minutes we have between bedtime and collapse.
Read full article →A practical operating model for AI agents, human approval gates, audit trails, governed workflows, and productized expertise.
Read full article →How insurance, healthcare, finance and other regulated Canadian businesses can deploy AI agents with governance, human approval workflows, audit trails and controlled leverage.
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Read full article →Why small businesses need AI governance just as much as enterprises. Five governance practices you can implement this week, from approval workflows to error handling plans.
Read full article →A practical risk framework for Canadian businesses adopting AI. Covers AIDA, PIPEDA, provincial regulations, and a five-step assessment process you can run in 30 minutes per tool.
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Read full article →The knowledge commerce landscape in 2026: course platforms, coaching marketplaces, assessment tools, and community platforms. Where AgencyAI fits and how to build a hybrid strategy.
Read full article →Deploying AI in insurance, financial services, and healthcare requires a governance framework that satisfies regulators. A three-layer model for compliant AI deployment in Canadian regulated industries.
Read full article →Three scalable consulting models that break the hours-for-dollars ceiling: productized assessments, tiered service architecture, and subscription monitoring. With real economics.
Read full article →Why fully autonomous AI is a trap. The case for human-supervised AI, how approval workflows work, and why AgencyAI's approval-first architecture delivers better results than set-it-and-forget-it systems.
Read full article →A practical four-phase roadmap for Canadian consultants embracing digital transformation. From digitizing operations to building scalable service models, with specific Canadian regulatory context.
Read full article →This might be the most counterintuitive thing I've learned. The people getting the best results from AI aren't the techies. They're the ones who deeply understand how their business works. A plumber I know uses AI to draft quotes and schedule follow-ups. He doesn't know what a large language model is. He knows that every job has sixteen steps and seven of them are paperwork. He pointed AI at the paperwork and got his afternoons back. A boutique law firm partner uses it to summarize case files before Monday morning prep. She doesn't care about prompt engineering. She cares about walking into a client meeting prepared. The pattern is always the same. Understand your process. Find the friction. Point the tool at the friction. The AI knowledge matters less than the self-knowledge.
Read full article →A lot of small business owners tell me they're waiting for AI to mature before they invest time in it. I get the instinct. Why learn something that's changing every month? Here's what I'd counter with. The businesses adopting AI now aren't learning specific tools. They're developing a muscle. The ability to look at a process, break it into steps, figure out which steps a machine can handle, and which ones need a human touch. That skill compounds. The business next door that's been experimenting with AI for six months isn't ahead because they know more tools. They're ahead because they've developed an intuition for where AI fits and where it doesn't. And by the time you start, they'll have a six-month head start on something that matters more than any single tool. The cost isn't the subscription fee. The cost is the learning curve you keep postponing.
Read full article →Someone asked me this over coffee and I had to really think about it. Because the answer today is radically different from even two years ago. I wouldn't hire a receptionist. I'd set up an AI phone system in an afternoon. I wouldn't lease office space. I'd build everything remote-first with AI handling scheduling, follow-ups, and the administrative noise that eats your first year. I wouldn't spend six months on a business plan. I'd spend six days building a prototype, let AI help me stress-test the model, and talk to ten potential customers by the end of week two. The barrier to starting a business has never been lower. But the barrier to running one well hasn't changed. You still need judgment, relationships, and the willingness to do hard things that AI can't do for you. Use the tools to get moving faster. Just don't confuse speed with direction.
Read full article →A friend of mine runs a six-person accounting firm. He called me last month, excited. He'd bought a subscription to an AI tool that promised to automate client communications. Three weeks later, he cancelled it. The tool was fine. The problem was he expected it to know his clients the way he knows his clients. He expected it to understand that Mrs. Patterson gets anxious about owing money and needs a gentle tone, or that the restaurant group needs their filings early because their fiscal year is weird. AI tools are powerful but they're not magical. They need context. They need you to tell them the rules of your specific world. The businesses that get results invest time upfront teaching the tool how their business actually works. The setup is the strategy. Most people skip it.
Read full article →I work in insurance. I build with AI. And I'm here to tell you that your broker isn't going anywhere. The headlines love to say AI is replacing intermediaries. What's actually happening is more interesting. The brokers who adopt AI are becoming dramatically more valuable, not less. They're using it to review policies in minutes instead of hours, catch coverage gaps that used to require a second set of eyes, and respond to clients before the client even knows they have a question. The broker who knows your business, your industry, your claims history, and your risk tolerance, and who now has AI doing the grunt work in the background? That person is worth more than they were last year. Not less. Technology doesn't eliminate good advisors. It makes them faster.
Read full article →I've seen enough small businesses dip a toe into AI to notice a pattern. The ones that get value ask themselves five questions first. The ones that waste money and time skip straight to the tools. What task do I hate doing every week? Who in my team has the most repetitive work? What's one thing we're slow at that competitors are fast at? What would I do with an extra five hours a week? Am I willing to be bad at this for a week while I learn? That last one matters more than the rest. The businesses that benefit from AI are the ones that tolerate being a beginner long enough to get competent.
Read full article →People ask me if the AI stuff I build at home changes how I work at the office. Honestly? Yes, but not in the way you'd think. I haven't brought a single tool from my home lab into work. What I brought was a different way of thinking about problems. When you've watched an AI agent try to solve something and fail, then try again differently, then fail better, you start to see your own processes differently. You start asking "why do we do this manually?" more often. You start noticing which decisions actually need a human and which ones just need a good set of rules. You get more honest about where people's time is being wasted. The transfer isn't technology. It's a lens.
Read full article →Here's something the AI boosters won't tell you. The first time you use AI for real work in your business, it's going to get things wrong. Not catastrophically wrong, but wrong enough to notice. It'll misinterpret a client's tone. It'll suggest a process that doesn't account for that one edge case you deal with every Thursday. It'll sound almost right but not quite. That gap between almost and actually right is where your expertise lives. And that's the whole point. AI isn't replacing your judgment. It's giving you a first draft that you sharpen with twenty years of knowing what actually works. The people who get the most from AI aren't the ones who trust it blindly. They're the ones who know exactly where it falls short.
Read full article →Before you spend a dollar on AI tools, try this. Open a free ChatGPT account. Take one task you do every week that feels repetitive. Feed it the context and see what comes back. I've watched a landscaping company owner use it to draft customer proposals in ten minutes instead of an hour. A bookkeeper who automated her follow-up emails. A real estate agent who generates listing descriptions while driving between showings. None of them took a course. None of them hired a consultant. They just started with something annoying and let the tool prove itself. If it saves you 15 minutes on the first try, you've found your starting point.
Read full article →I talk to a lot of small business owners who feel like they're falling behind because they don't have an "AI strategy." They read about enterprise deployments and think they need the same thing, just smaller. You don't. What you need is one problem that's eating your time every week, and a willingness to try something new. That's it. The consultants and vendors selling "AI transformation packages" to businesses with five employees are doing you a disservice. Start with a pain point. Solve it. Learn from it. Then decide if you want to do more.
Read full article →Most AI content makes it look easy: deploy an agent, automate a workflow, watch productivity happen. Here's what nobody talks about: doing all of that while leading a team, launching personal projects, and showing up for your family. The breakthrough wasn't building more tools — it was discovering how to make AI work as a coordination layer that holds it all together. What I'm learning is that AI isn't replacing orchestration — it's amplifying the orchestrator.
Read full article →Every ops leader I know has felt this: someone talented leaves, and weeks later you realize how much institutional knowledge walked out with them — quietly, invisibly, with no backup. We've tried wikis. SharePoint. AI chatbots. None of it has stuck. The reason? We've been building storage systems. What we actually need is a coordination system — one that actively routes knowledge to the right person, tracks who knows what, and gets smarter every time an exchange happens. This week I built one. It works inside O365 (no IT approvals needed). And the same architecture runs across AI agents too.
Read full article →Last week, I built the exact same capability in two completely different ways — one using corporate O365 tools, another using open source agentic AI. Inside corporate walls: Power Automate + Excel + Copilot Notebook. Manual button press, but 100% compliant and saving me 35 minutes per week. Outside corporate walls: OpenClaw + Barnaby + agentic AI. Fully autonomous capture of meetings, decisions, and tasks with Mission Control dashboard. You don't choose ONE. You use BOTH. Context-aware tool selection — corporate data? Tier 1. Personal development? Tier 2.
Read full article →Last week, I hardened my AI infrastructure. Firewalls. File permissions. Port bindings. Access controls. And here's what surprised me: the AI handled it brilliantly — as long as I set clear expectations and established boundaries. That's the pattern I keep seeing. Autonomy without alignment is chaos. But autonomy with structure? That's when things get interesting.
Read full article →Three weeks ago, I gave an AI access to a sandbox with a limited set of information, new credentials, and a Linux server. I told it to help me build things. It's a Bichon. (Long story.) AI agents went from research paper summaries on ChatGPT to my desktop in less than a year. And I realized: most people aren't ready for what's coming.
Read full article →Get regular insights on navigating the agentic economy with resilience, curiosity, and agency. Written by a senior technology and operations leader who's learning by building.
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