The Demand

Do not hire someone to build your AI stack before you have used AI directly for thirty days on your own problems. Use it for one administrative task this week — scheduling, cost modeling, anything mathematical. Use it for one adversarial thinking pass this week — take your current biggest decision and ask AI to argue against it. See what surfaces.Thirty days of direct use will tell you more about what your operation needs from AI than any consultant's two-hour architecture session. Then hire the help for what the direct use revealed you cannot build alone. In that order.Deploy the admin. Develop the judgment. The ceiling is yours to claim.

The Work

Before hiring anyone to build your AI stack, use it yourself for thirty days:
One administrative task you will use it for this week — scheduling, cost modeling, anything mathematical:
One adversarial thinking pass you will run this week — your current biggest decision, argued against:
What surfaced that you didn't expect:
What thirty days of direct use revealed you actually need outside help for:
The order you will follow: deploy the admin, develop the judgment, then hire for what direct use revealed. What's first: