Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Quick question: Are you using AI in your business yet?

If your answer is "not really" or "we're planning to add it to our product someday," you're missing out on the biggest immediate wins.

I've been doing deep tech for 25+ years, and I'm seeing a pattern: companies immediately try to integrate AI into their products before learning how to use it internally.

That's like trying to build a Ferrari when you've never driven a car.

Let me break down what actually works 👇

📒 DEEP DIVE

How I (Actually) Use AI in My Day-to-Day

Real use cases for AI to cut down needless busywork, without overcomplicating it.

I'm in meetings with founders all day and just yesterday 100% of calls were about showing people how to use AI tools effectively.

The biggest mistake? Everyone thinks they're supposed to integrate AI into their product as a first step.

That isn't it at all. The first place to implement AI is all the internal tasks that eat your time but don't directly drive value.

Take wordsmithing as an example. Pre-AI, how much time did you spend getting the words exactly right for marketing, emails, blog posts, etc.? 

If you care about the context you're writing in, you probably spent hours on this.

While it puts polish on your work, it doesn't drive a ton of value by itself. Now you can do this in a way that's effective and personalized without the massive time suck.

Context Is Everything

What makes AI truly powerful is all the data you're already generating.

All this data you're generating—your transcripts, emails, Slack messages—becomes valuable context. When you gather that information, you give AI more to work with so it can understand what's actually in your head.

Let me show you a real example of how I'm using this. Recently I took transcripts from our previous 15 podcast episodes and asked AI to:

1. Summarize each episode

2. Create an index of topics

3. Analyze our audience based on content

4. Generate 40 new topic ideas aligned with what's worked before

5. Identify every place we said "We should do a podcast about this" (and cross-reference with what we'd already done)

Total time spent: 5 minutes.

When the AI-generated the audience description, it was spot on. When it gave me 40 new topic ideas, I looked at every one of them and thought, "Great, there's our next 40 topics."

This isn't just about saving time—it's about seeing patterns in your existing content that you'd never have time to find manually. The more context you provide, the more valuable the output becomes.

The Ultimate Thinking Tool

Beyond productivity, AI is an incredible thinking tool.

When you're in a tricky situation with a client or employee, provide all the context to an AI and ask, "What am I missing? What does this person need to hear from me?"

AI excels at this because it doesn't have an emotional attachment to the situation.

What's actually happening isn't that you're taking the AI's output and sending it verbatim. What's happening is you're learning. You're seeing what a disinterested third party notices that you couldn't. You're growing in your ability to communicate and navigate complex situations.

That's why beyond being a thinking tool, it's the best education tool I've ever seen. For someone like me who loves learning, the amount of ground I can cover in such a short time is almost dangerous.

This is where I've found insane value personally. I can binge on learning in ways that weren't possible before. Here are real examples from questions I asked this week:

My tire was bulging on the side (not completely blown). I took a picture with ChatGPT and asked, "Is this safe to drive on?"

Instant answer: No.

Another time, the coffee maker at my Airbnb stopped working. I used the video function in the app, showed it the issue, and got step-by-step troubleshooting that fixed it immediately.

Practical AI Tips You Can Use Today

There are infinite ways to use AI, but here are specific ways to start using it that will pay immediate dividends:

Organize overwhelming to-do lists: When you're staring at a massive list, ask the AI: "I'm overwhelmed by this list. What order should I tackle these tasks in?" It'll give you a prioritized plan that works. (Trust me—coming from someone with a never-ending to-do list.)

Create your own mini board of directors: When you provide AI with context about your business—transcripts, emails, Slack messages—you've got this little mini board of directors that can go through all the details. A lot of real boards don't know the details about your business, but your AI "board" does.

Turn meeting transcripts into action: Take your meeting transcripts and have AI summarize them in specific ways that extract exactly what you need.

Compare multiple AI perspectives: I use all the major tools—ChatGPT, Claude, Grok—and often ask the same question to different ones. You can even say to one, "I asked AI the exact same question, and here's what it said. Compare and give me the best of both." This works surprisingly well.

Pro tip: Don't take the advice blindly. If something's wrong, tell it: "No, this isn't right because of X." That conversation itself becomes a learning opportunity for you and the AI. 

Security Considerations That Matter

Before you dive in, there's one crucial thing to get right—security.

If you're concerned about security (and you should be), there are a few things you should know. First—AI technology itself isn't evil or stealing secrets. It's just a model trained on data. That's it.

Where you need to be careful is with the services hosting these models. They can absolutely take your data if you're not using a company that honors their promises.

For the major players (OpenAI/ChatGPT and Anthropic/Claude), there's a setting when you purchase. If you use the free version, they're taking your data—those things aren't really free. You're the product.

But if you're paying for a pro account, there's a setting that says, "Don't use my stuff for retraining."

Check that, and you can feel good about your privacy.

Getting Started Is The Hardest Part

Every skill I've ever learned follows the same pattern: the beginning is frustrating, but improvement comes faster than you expect.

AI is no different. Your first time using these tools will probably leave you thinking, "It doesn't understand what I want." That's not the AI's fault—it's that you haven't yet learned how to communicate with it effectively.

What separates the founders from getting massive results from those still on the sidelines isn't technical skill—it's simply getting started and pushing through that initial learning curve.

Start with something small. Don't try to reinvent your entire business model overnight. Pick an internal task that's eating your time—document creation, email drafting, content planning—and let AI handle it.

Within a week, you'll wonder how you ever worked without it.

🎙 EPISODE OF THE WEEK

This week on "Build Your Business," we dive into crisis management and leading through chaos—one of my favorite topics.

Every business faces unexpected emergencies at some point. In this episode, we share our firsthand experience navigating a sudden business crisis and the exact strategies we used to not just survive but come out stronger on the other side.

If you want to be prepared for the unexpected (and trust me, you should be), this episode is for you.

Listen wherever you listen to podcasts: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube

BEFORE YOU GO…

Many people ask me about AI replacing jobs. Yes, if the world stayed exactly as it is today, much of what we do would eventually get automated.

But that's not what happens with technological shifts.

Just like the Industrial Revolution didn't leave rowers permanently unemployed when steamboats came along, AI is opening up an entirely new universe of opportunities we couldn't see before.

The key is starting now. The gap between having an idea and bringing it to life is shrinking dramatically. Those who learn these tools will have an almost unfair advantage.

Start with the basics—text-based AI for content, decision support, and internal processes. Build your skills there, then expand.

The choices are simple: Start now and have a massive head start, or play catch-up later.

You choose.

See you next time,

Chris