What actually works when you put AI to work on real business systems — the tools worth your money, the ones that fall over in production, and the shortcuts that turn a quarter-long IT project into a week. Written between builds, not by a content team.
By Michael Daugherty — Fractional CTO · AI automation · custom internal apps
6 notes
The bill was running $2,500–$3,000 on a busy day, and almost all of it was inbound calls sitting in a Twilio IVR. Nobody was buying software — they were renting a phone menu by the second.
I support all four and I'll happily work in yours. But after twenty years of wiring systems together, the honest answer is that a custom integration is now more robust, more flexible, and often faster to build than assembling the same thing out of connector boxes.
Six policies that stop the attacks small businesses actually get hit with, in the order I deploy them — plus the break-glass account that keeps a bad policy from becoming a very long evening.
Cancelling subscriptions pays for the build. That's the easy math. The reason it actually sticks is something else entirely — and it's the part most consolidation projects get wrong.
An honest field report after shipping real internal tools with an AI coding agent — the parts where it saves weeks, the parts where it quietly creates a mess, and the guardrails that decide which one you get.
Pointing a language model at a stack of PDFs is the easy part. Here's the architecture that keeps a confident wrong number from becoming a paid invoice.