Jonas Bull Navigating the frontier between AI and human

The instrument

Four questions, in order.

Pass or fail, cheapest kill first, no partial credit. I run this on other people's AI projects for a living, and roughly four in ten survive it. Most of the rest die on question two. Killing a project in week two is cheap. Killing it in month six is a loan you are still paying on.

Before you start

Two people read this page differently.

If you own the business, this is a focus instrument: what to build next, and what Monday looks like. If you lend to one or invest in one, it is a diligence instrument: is the AI story value or narrative. Same engine, different output.

Bring one task you already suspect is bleeding money. Nothing you type here leaves your browser unless you ask me to send it.

Stage one

The gates.

A strength on one gate does not offset a fail on another. If you fail one, stop, fix that, come back. Then, and only then, argue about what the thing is worth.

Gate one

Granularity

Unanswered

The unit of AI value is the task. Not the job, and not "operations." Name the task, name who does it, and put an hourly cost on that person. If you cannot do all three, there is no project yet.

One repeated task. Same shape every time, different contents.
How often it actually happens, not how often it should.
Door to door, including the part where they go find the answer.
What that person costs you per hour, not what they take home.

Gate two

Verification economics

Locked

Every AI system has an error rate, and it is never zero no matter what the demo says. So the question is what a wrong answer costs you, and whether checking the output is cheaper than producing it. Most cases die right here.

Write your failure price down before you talk to anybody who sells software.
How long it takes a competent person to tell whether the answer is right.

Gate three

Durability

Locked

Build where your data or your workflow is the thing that makes you different. Buy where it is a commodity. Most small businesses have no moat here, and that is fine, but then you are buying operating leverage and you should price it like opex. If your advisor never says "just buy that," get a different advisor.

Is the data or the workflow behind this task something a competitor could not easily copy?

Does a product already on the market do most of this?

Is the honest answer that the technology is not there yet?

Gate four

Proof of correct

Locked

Before you build, say in writing what a correct output is, and have a fixed set of inputs where you already know the right answer. Without that you cannot tell whether a change helped, you cannot swap to a cheaper model when one lands next quarter, and you cannot defend the spend to the person who signed the check. No eval set, no build.

Can you write down, in a paragraph, what a correct output looks like?

Do you have, or could you assemble inside two days, real inputs with known correct answers?

No score resurrects a kill. No valuation, however pretty, waives a gate.

Stage two opens when all four gates pass

The page

What you walk out with.

The output is never a yes or no on "should we do AI." It is a short ranked list of the things that survived, with owners and dollar figures on them, and a longer list of the things you are done pretending about.

Next

Bring one task and the second meeting is short.

One task with an hourly cost on it, the cost of getting it wrong, and the honest answer about where your data lives. That is the whole intake. Book time directly, or send me the run and I will read it before we talk.

There is no model behind this page. It is arithmetic you can check. Seemed like the best way to build a tool whose whole job is killing AI projects.