Claude AI

I spent an hour with a Claude power user this week. One hour.

I walked in thinking I had a pretty good handle on what AI could do for an operation. I had been using it for a while. Built a few things I was genuinely proud of. Shipping dashboards. File conversion tool. Financial reporting models. Automations that were quietly saving hours every week and freeing me to focus on work that actually required - human judgment.

I thought I was ahead of the curve. I was barely at the beginning of it.

What I saw in that hour reframed everything I thought I knew about what was possible. The models. The complexity. The ability to layer data, logic, and operational context into something that doesn't just report what happened but starts to predict what's coming and recommend what to do about it.

I've spent my career building operational infrastructure. Systems that create visibility. Processes that generate reliable data. Teams that know how to use both.

That foundation matters more now than it ever has. Because AI doesn't create good outcomes from bad data. It amplifies whatever you feed it. Clean operations produce powerful models. Messy ones just produce confident looking wrong answers.

But the ceiling on what's buildable right now - for operators who are willing to learn it - is higher than most people in this industry realize.

I'm not done learning. I'm just getting started.

If you're in operations and you haven't sat down with someone who really knows how to use these tools - find that person. Buy them coffee. It might be the most valuable hour you spend this year.