Turning Point

I was getting dressed for work when my wife walked in: “I think it’s time.”

I forgot everything else. We drove to the hospital. After an exhausting day, at 20:20, our son arrived. Holding him - feeling his body move, watching his face wrinkle when he cried, gripping those tiny hands broke something open in me. Some moments defy words.

Everything changed after that day. Routines. Priorities. Goals. No one prepares for this kind of revolution. Things I thought mattered stopped mattering. I couldn’t articulate life’s meaning before. Now I see it when I look into his eyes.

Some life experiences are so profound that it defies articulation. To understand it, you need to feel it. The most important transformations don’t wait for you to prepare. They prepare you for everything that follows.

First AI Steps

In September 2024, I bet on building an in-house AI platform to power any use case. We had no resources, no experience building AI-powered non-determinstic products, no executive support. Just vision. Not even a dedicated team.

Chance brought us our first use case: a customer service assistant. AI Agents were still forming as a concept. We chose deterministic workflows instead—a pragmatic choice that proved efficient and consistent.

We shipped end of February 2025. I was on parental leave but came to the office anyway. A four-person team had built our first AI solution in three months, all believing in a vision. (Read about it on AWS.)

Let the problem guide the solution, not the hype. A small team willing to take calculated risks can achieve what seems impossible.

AI for Everyone

Everyone was already using ChatGPT. That meant if we solved their daily work problems, they’d adopt our solutions too. We built an internal AI chat platform with custom agent building and RAG. People used it. They built their own knowledge bases and agents.

The feedback told us everything: “It’s slower than ChatGPT.” That was the only criticism. We were being compared to the industry leader, not questioned on relevance.

After some architecture work, we built advanced agents. Talk-To-Data (not creative, but clear) lets users ask questions in plain language. It generates SQL, runs queries, and creates reports. We solved a basic problem: access to data.

Deep Research works like Gemini or ChatGPT’s research tools, but users can upload internal documents. The agent synthesizes internal and external knowledge into reports. Marketing now runs brand research and creates product briefs with it.

Beyond user-facing tools, we built backend agents that enrich, summarize, categorize, and generate content within workflows.

When users compare you to the gold standard, you’re doing something right. Enterprise AI success means making intelligence accessible enough that everyone becomes a builder.

From Wild West to Governed AI

AI is everywhere now. Chat platforms offer registration-free entry. SaaS tools enable AI features by default. Vendors bundle AI into everything.

The problem: everyone applies AI without governance or business justification.

We proposed a governance framework. Every AI use case or solution passes through a one-stop evaluation. A cross-functional team—AI experts, compliance, and business—reviews each request. If it passes, we implement. If not, we find the underlying problem and explore alternatives.

Democratization without governance breeds chaos. The challenge isn’t preventing innovation—it’s channeling it through structured evaluation.

Trust the Process and Grind

My nights shattered for the first time in my life. Not once—constantly, unpredictably. Having a baby blurs day and night into sleepless sameness. I survived, like every other parent.

There was no time to breathe. I cared for our newborn while chasing our AI vision through blockers and without support. We felt like a startup fighting for survival on two fronts.

Then, at year’s end, we found funding. Validation arrived. We believed in the vision. We trusted the process. Resilience through the grind became our path.

Some periods demand we fight on multiple fronts with no time to process either battle. Resilience means maintaining belief when validation feels impossibly distant. Success may come easily to others while your path stays brutal—but those who refuse to quit get there. That’s the guarantee persistence offers.