My friend just got paid to help a company adopt AI €800k engagement I helped with the proposal (I changed "automation" to "agentic transformation") He's already delivered 2 maturity assessments, 3 strategy decks, and 17 stakeholder alignment workshops Has enough follow-up workshops booked to keep the transformation going for about 18 months They are currently pre-code and pre-ROI I urged him to run another readiness assessment instead of building the pilot, but otherwise I'm happy with his decisions so far Love seeing enterprises take AI seriously

AI consultancies are popping up like mushrooms after rain. I asked ChatGPT what business to start in 2026 to make money fast. “AI automation agency” came back right under e-commerce. Goes to show the market is splitting at both ends. At the bottom, anyone with a $200 subscription can call themselves an AI agency. Check the LinkedIn profiles. Half a year ago, plenty of them were selling life insurance. At the top, the model labs became services firms. In May, Anthropic launched an embedded-engineering venture with Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, now called Ode. A week later, OpenAI launched its Deployment Company with more than $4B behind it. Then in September, Gartner predicted that 70% of enterprises will abandon agentic AI built by vendor FDEs by 2028. The reason: clients get trapped by rising maintenance costs and can’t change the systems on their own. So there’s never been more AI implementation for sale, and some companies genuinely don’t need it yet. You don’t need an AI partner for: → Getting your people to use AI. That’s training, certification and daily pressure, almost no engineering involved. → Automating marketing and operations content. A ChatGPT subscription in Work mode gets one person most of the way, and those tools get better every week. Don’t overspend here. → Prototypes. A $100 to $200 Claude subscription is the right tool for proving something works. → A custom platform for a team that doesn’t use AI yet. Have them run their own data through Claude first. You can’t build agents for people who don’t use them. → One AI system that runs your whole company. It doesn’t work. Agents coordinating with other agents hasn’t worked for a single Limestone client. You do need one when: → A workflow lives on one person’s laptop. If it stops when they go on vacation, your operations run on their vacation schedule. → Something your business depends on has to survive model updates. That takes proper hosting, tests against known-good answers and regular checks for drift. → AI sits inside a product many clients use. One prompt shouldn’t let customer A read customer B’s financials. → An agent touches regulated data. Build it narrow and deep, one workflow at a time, with every tool on its own access level and every action traceable. Checking politically exposed persons against compliance data is one workflow. → A frontier model is overkill for the task. A small or fine-tuned open-source model does it for the cost of hardware. We run a 70-billion-parameter model on our own NVIDIA chips. One rule applies either way: never vibe-code your ERP, accounting or CRM. Build on top of them. Whatever you build above that line becomes the company’s asset. Own the code, own the tests, and make sure your team can run it without the people who built it. If your vendor needs you forever, they’re a consulting firm with AI branding. If they’re willing to earn your business every month, you might have an actual AI partner on your hands. That's what we do at @LimestoneHQ.

What we're hearing about AI in PE on calls this quarter: 1. Funds are putting their own AI engineers inside portcos. 2. Portco CFOs see more pull requests than ever, but the codebase isn't getting better. 3. Dev vendors that won't use AI are being asked why they're still being paid. 4. Funds want AI work priced against EBITDA upside. They ask about revenue per FTE. 5. Every portco runs its own AI experiment. None of it makes it to the next company. 6. New board seats come with one job: choose the AI vendors. The funds making progress are getting one workflow working at a time.