At Transcendent Software, we routinely hear from companies that know AI will play a role in reaching their business goals. The reasons are all over the place, but the pattern is remarkably consistent. A company sees the potential, buys a tool or starts building something, and expects momentum to follow. Then the organization discovers that […]
The happy path makes a good demo. Recovery is what makes a system useful. About six months into my first professional software job, our team had a problem. We were building technology for the ticketing industry at a time when much of that industry still ran on fax machines, automated phone dialers, a few websites, […]
The recent OpenAI and Hugging Face security incident is worth paying attention to, but not because every business should panic about AI. It is worth paying attention to because it shows where this whole AI era is heading. OpenAI said the incident happened during an internal evaluation of advanced cyber capabilities. The models were being […]
A lot of AI and automation projects do not stall because the model is weak. They stall because the next decision is hidden. The business has a process. The process has exceptions. The exceptions live in someone’s head. The approvals happen in email. The status lives in a spreadsheet. The real business rule is buried […]
A lot of companies are still treating AI like a tool selection problem. Which model should we use?Which chatbot should we try?Which vendor has the best demo?Which feature should we add? Those questions are not useless, but they are usually not the best place to start. A better question is: What work needs a better […]
I missed my normal Sunday writing window this week. That is not a complaint. It is just what happened. We hosted a party on Saturday for the 250th birthday of the United States, and by the time Sunday came around, the weekend had already become the lesson. The party was spectacular. The fireworks were great. […]
AI has made it easier than ever to get software to a first version. That is not a small thing. A founder with an idea, persistence, and the right tools can now build something that would have taken a much larger team not that long ago. Internal tools, mobile apps, dashboards, automation workflows, prototypes, and […]
One of the most useful questions in business technology is also one of the simplest: Why? My son is almost four, so I hear that question a lot right now. No matter what we are doing, he wants to know why. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it is exhausting. Sometimes it forces me to explain […]
Most conversations about artificial intelligence begin with capability. Can it write content? Can it summarize documents? Can it analyze data? Can it automate a process that currently requires human effort? Those questions are important, but they are also relatively easy to answer. Modern AI systems are increasingly capable, and each new generation of tools seems […]
Most businesses do not start with an AI problem. They start with a business problem. Something takes too long. Something breaks too often. Something depends on one person remembering every hidden step. Something lives across spreadsheets, inboxes, old software, shared drives, tribal knowledge, and a few “just ask Jake” moments that somehow became part of […]
