AIWA "The One Thing" #22: Individual Feel. Enterprise Intuition. Dominate.

I was recently interviewed by David Greely on SmarterMarkets™, the outstanding podcast presented by Abaxx Technologies as part of their "How to Raise Your Agent" series.

During the interview, when Dave asked me "Where do you even start?", you can imagine how stoked I was to answer.

1: You have two choices. You can use AI to get answers without thinking. Or you can use it to think better than you ever have.

The individual version of that edge is taste, feel. The enterprise version is Enterprise Intuition. Both are built the same way. Rockstars like those reading this, getting their hands dirty, doing the work, codifying the workflows, iterating.

These are things that can be learned but can't be taught. They can be encoded into your intelligent systems. But whatever you do, don't forget you get to choose how you use AI.

I made this case in AIWA "TOT" #09: The Gap is the Game. T-shaped is out. E-shaped is in. AI is the force multiplier that makes the combination unstoppable.

2: Start inside your circle of competence (s/o Charlie Munger). Something you're lights out at. The kind of thing you're known for.

Why there? Because AI is the furthest thing from a silver bullet.

The confidence it has when it's wrong isn't malicious. It's the opposite. It's eager to help and sometimes it needs your help to know when it's crushing it and when it's over its skis.

You catch the sycophant. You catch the hallucination. You build judgment. That judgment is taste and taste accelerates into metacognition you can act on.

You don't get stronger paying someone to lift the weights for you. Put in the work and you will see the magic.

When AI does in minutes what used to take you days, you will never unsee it.

My man Greg Boone said it best on AI with Alec Podcast E26. He learned more in six months of hands-on AI than in the prior five years. That is the choice and he's leading from the front which is how you pull a whole team into making it too.

3: At the company level, Enterprise Intuition is what you get when the feel of your best people is captured and connected. Not just added up.

Every company has an ontology.

Think of it as the 500 or so core concepts that describe what your business actually does.

What it is. How it is built. What sets it apart. That knowledge lives scattered across documents, Slack, emails and the heads of your people. That is the map.

Here is the part most leaders miss. The map is not the judgment.

Enterprise Intuition is the earned feel for how to act on the map. Where AI helps. Where it breaks. Which concept matters right now. You cannot buy it from a vendor. You cannot buy it from a deck.

You build it the way taste is built. By doing the work.

I told a story during my conversation with Dave about a $900M ARR data analytics company whose agents flew off the rails.

A data company. They bought the platform and the pitch that came with it. "Get your data AI ready, then build all the agents you want and everything works out great."

They skipped the intuition. They skipped the second order thinking. Expensive lesson.

I wrote about this in the very first AIWA TOT #01 on context graphs. Capturing not just what happened, but why. That is the foundation Enterprise Intuition is built on.

*s / o Jaya Gupta (author of "AI's trillion dollar opportunity: Context graphs") + Foundation Capital

Show me a company that builds intelligent systems to enable the aggregate feel of its rockstars, systematically, with the right guardrails and I'll show you a company that is going to dominate.

Automate. Augment. Rewire.

Check out the full conversation with Dave Greely and let me know what you think.

Humans + Machines. Never Humans vs Machines.