Insights

Notes on operations, AI, and running the place.

Essays on what actually breaks inside an operation, what AI changes about it, and what it takes to lead through either. Most of these appeared first on LinkedIn.

Operations · July 2026 · 3 min read

Automation is an amplifier

Layer AI onto a flawed workflow and it doesn't find the flaw — it runs it faster and at volume. Before choosing an AI tool, find out what your process does when it breaks.

Operations · August 2026 · 3 min read

The unexamined process

Writing an undocumented process down exposed steps nobody would choose; redesigning it cut repair turnaround 75%. Put AI on an unexamined process and you make it permanent.

Operations · September 2026 · 2 min read

Exceptions don't leave a trace: why you can't map an operation by instrumenting it

The real operation lives in its exceptions, and exceptions leave no trace. They go undocumented because it was never anyone's job, which no amount of observation fixes.

Operations · September 2026 · 2 min read

In 2018, the FDA said yes

The FDA cleared the first autonomous AI diagnostic in 2018. Adoption is still limited, and everything that sat in between was operations work, not regulation.

Operations · August 2026 · 3 min read

The workaround that worked

Every screen that failed got restarted by hand, and it worked every time. That's why nobody found the ceiling underneath — the tell is labor. The network went from 500 screens to more than 12,000.

Operations · September 2026 · 3 min read

The one-page AI rule

Most small-company AI policies are a feeling, not a rule. One page that names the approved tools, the account, what never goes in, and who to ask does more than twelve pages in a drive.

Operations · September 2026 · 3 min read

Who notices? OpenAI's six AI incidents, read as an operator

OpenAI disclosed six cases of its models misbehaving. Inside a business they'd be ordinary incidents, and only your incident response policy decides whether anyone finds or reports them.

Operations · September 2026 · 3 min read

You onboarded the person. Not the agent.

An AI runs the therapy session and a clinician watches. The selling point is a supervision ratio, and it is an operations question your staff onboarding already answers.

Operations · October 2026 · 3 min read

Usage dashboards measure the wrong layer

A usage dashboard counts what the vendor can instrument: seats, sessions, tokens. Whether the work got faster or cleaner lives in your process, and nobody sells a report for that.

Operations · October 2026 · 3 min read

The tool that arrived before the question

GPS told dispatch where every van was, but not which one could complete the call. The tool arrived before anyone had named the decision it was supposed to serve.

Operations · October 2026 · 3 min read

The switching cost was never the data

Migration tools move fields and records. What an organization learned about those fields, which date means what and which ones got repurposed, does not come with them.

Operations · October 2026 · 2 min read

The routine work was the training

The routine work is the first thing you automate, and it is where people built the judgment you rely on when something goes wrong. Automate it and the work still gets done. The learning stops.

Operations · October 2026 · 3 min read

The fix was not more money

A stalled vendor project came back asking for more money. What fixed it was a punch list, honest ownership on both sides, and one day with the right set of eyes.

Operations · November 2026 · 2 min read

What the record can hold

Some records were never built to hold the answer. The field that mattered most on our delivery tickets recorded how each value got there: scanned and verified, or keyed and asserted.