Hard-Fought Lessons from a Year of Scaling AI in an SMB

Last year, I showed how we started using AI at a small industrial company—with no IT team and no fluff. Since then, we’ve scaled those early wins in sales, marketing, support across the company and two acquisitions — without consultants or custom software. But it wasn’t easy. In this talk, I’ll share what we broke, what we fixed, and the messy, behind-the-scenes lessons we learned trying to make AI stick in a real business. You’ll walk away with a practical playbook for growing AI inside a small team—what to automate, where humans still matter, and how to budget for the things no one warns you about.