Field Notes

Notes from the lab.

Practical, calm writing on AI systems, diagnostic funnels, and client trust, for advisors, CPAs, and professional-service firms.

Most disappointing AI purchases are decision problems, not product problems. Four questions to answer before the trial starts.

The badge is meant to say the firm is current. For a buyer of trust, it often raises a question about judgment that the page never answers.

Most firm websites are brochures. A brochure describes you. A system gives a visitor a next step small enough to take today.

Delegation, description, discernment, and diligence. What each one means at the scale of a small professional firm, and which one is usually missing.

Referrals feel like luck because most firms leave them to chance. Four things turn goodwill into a repeatable path.

The rules did not change because the drafting got faster. What an adviser can safely hand to a machine, and where the review has to sit.

A diagnostic gives a stranger something useful about their own situation before they have to talk to you. That is why it converts.

A working line: the machine can prepare the work, a person decides what a client is told. What that means task by task.

Most firms reaching for AI are missing something simpler. AI applied to an unclear offer produces unclear output, faster.