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Straight Answers on Applied AI

Field notes from real rollouts: security, spend, agents, evals, and the operating model. Search the archive, or just ask your question.

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AI Adoption

The 14 Levels of an AI Rollout, Translated for a Mid-Market Budget

A well-known rollout map runs fourteen levels from first audit to self-guided agent. Here is how each level actually plays out when you have $1M to $20M in revenue, not a data department.

Ryan Drake

Ryan Drake

Jul 20, 2026 · 11 min read

Agents & Evals

Workflow or Agent? When to Graduate From Deterministic Automation

Autonomy is a spectrum, not a switch. Most of the value for a mid-market business lives in the boring middle, and handing an agent real control is a decision to make on purpose.

Jul 20, 2026·9 min read
AI Adoption

How to Run an AI Audit That Actually Leads Somewhere

Most "AI audits" are a sixty-page deck and an invoice. Here is the one-week version that ends in a ranked queue of work, not a strategy binder nobody opens.

Jul 19, 2026·9 min read
AI Adoption

How to Choose Your First AI Project

Your first AI build is not really about that project. It is about buying credibility and runway for the next ten. Pick a boring back-office win, and pick it on purpose.

Jul 19, 2026·8 min read
AI Adoption

The Internal AI Hackathon Playbook

The best AI use case in your business is almost never the one leadership guessed. A two-day internal hackathon drags it into the open, if you run it so the prototypes survive Monday.

Jul 18, 2026·8 min read
Agents & Evals

How to Evaluate AI Agents Before You Trust Them With Real Work

The demo always looks good. Here is the eval playbook mid-market teams use to measure agents, catch regressions, and improve them on purpose.

Jul 14, 2026·9 min read
Model Strategy

How to Build a Multi-Model AI Strategy Without Running Everything Twice

Fable 5 vanished for 19 days. GPT-5.6 launched gated. The past month is the strongest case yet for multi-model, and for not over-hedging.

Jul 13, 2026·8 min read
Cost & ROI

Token Spend Is the New Cloud Bill

AI token bills are repeating the early cloud story. How to control spend without rationing your way back to manual work, and what to measure instead.

Jul 11, 2026·8 min read
Agents & Evals

Eight Hours of Agent Work, Eight Minutes of Review

Agents now outproduce the humans checking them. Here is the framework we use to review a full day of agent output without reading all of it.

Jul 10, 2026·8 min read
Governance & Security

How to Roll Out Claude Code and Cowork Without Betting the Company Data

A security architecture playbook for agentic AI: data tiers, contract terms, permission modes, and the regulated-industry rollout pattern.

Jul 8, 2026·8 min read
Governance & Security

The AI Governance Operating Model: Freedom Inside Guardrails

A two-lane operating model for governing AI: let anyone build in a sandbox, gate anything others depend on, and make every leader own the results.

Jul 6, 2026·8 min read
AI Adoption

AI Literate, AI Enabled, AI First: The Adoption Roadmap That Actually Sticks

A three-stage AI adoption roadmap with checkable markers per stage, and how to move a whole organisation through it without leaving anyone behind.

Jul 2, 2026·9 min read
Data & Knowledge

Building the Company Brain Without Rebuilding Your Data Stack

You do not need a data warehouse rebuild to make AI useful. You need a thin retrieval layer, a capture habit, and honest use-case prioritisation.

Jun 26, 2026·8 min read

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