Hey!

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

Q1 was probably the biggest turnaround moment in our company's history.

We'd already started making the turn toward AI before the market was asking for it. (I expected demand earlier than it came.) Then Q1 came, and it came fast.

Now, what I'm doing every day looks almost nothing like what I was doing 6 months ago.

Here's what the past 3 months have looked like at Surton, and what they mean for the future of the business. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

Why Q1 Was The Biggest Turnaround Moment in Surton's History

How the market finally caught up to a turn we'd already made—and what the work looks like on the other side. 

Where We Started

For a long time, Surton was built around a genuinely complicated problem: cloud deployments. The various cloud technologies that companies run on are difficult to navigate, and doing it well takes expertise.

We knew early on there would always be demand for that work, and we built our bench around it. It's an area we're legitimately strong in, and it was the center of what we did.

There's still demand for that work, but we've been steadily making the turn toward being an AI-first company. We started that turn early—before the market was asking for it, as it turns out.

On Being Early

From the inside, being early doesn't feel early. It just feels obvious.

In my world, AI has been the only conversation for 2.5 years (maybe more). So naturally, I expected the client requests to reflect that.

I was waiting for the market to show up...and then it didn't. At least not right away.

I've been through this enough times to recognize the pattern:

I see something coming → I become convinced it's the next big shift → I expect it to hit tomorrow

Then 2 years go by, and suddenly everyone around me is saying, "Oh, have you heard about this AI thing?"

Yeah...I have.

The market always lags the conviction of the people already living inside the shift. I should have expected that. But it still caught me off guard.

When Q1 Hit

The nature of our inbound changed in the last 3 months. Clients stopped coming to us with cloud or infrastructure problems.

Instead, they were asking completely different questions:

• How do we embed AI in our engineering?

• How do we use AI as engineers?

• What should our approach to AI actually be?

Just last week, a client reached out asking if I could host a series of calls walking their team and their clients through how they should be thinking about AI internally and what it could look like built into their products.

And that's just one example. Almost every client we have wants something similar, and then a whole pile of new companies is coming to us because they need help figuring out how to actually implement this stuff.

At some point, this technology crossed a line. It's reached a level of quality where you really do ignore it at your own peril. You can't look the other way anymore. It's hit critical mass—and the proof is in who's calling and what they're asking.

What My Days Look Like Now

I spend 0 time doing traditional engineering, deployments, infrastructure, or cloud work.

100% of what I do right now is AI work—either directly with a client or training an executive. A lot of it is executive training.

I'm on calls with CEOs and founders, and the format is usually the same: Give me a problem. Let's work on it together. I just want you to see what's possible. And then we end up in this idea explosion that stretches on for a long time.

Because that's what this technology does. It's a door opener. Watching that click for someone—seeing them realize what's sitting in front of them—is some of the most engaging work I've done.

The Most Fun (and Most Exhausting)

This has been the most fun I've had in my entire career. No question.

It's also been absolutely exhausting.

If you've spent any time working with these tools, you already know the feeling. Just 1 more prompt. Just 1 more prompt. And then you look up, and it's 3 in the morning.

That's where I've been living. Seismic shifts feel this way when you're inside them—exhilarating and completely unsustainable at the same time.

I've come to think that's a decent signal that something important is actually happening.

BEFORE YOU GO…

There's a difference between watching a technology mature and having to actually decide what to do about it.

For a while, experimenting was a reasonable answer. Q1 told me that answer has an expiration date.

The window for calling AI adoption optional is closing. And I think the market's finally realizing that, too.

Talk soon,

Chris.