{"slug": "i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke", "title": "I let AI run my company for 6 months. Here's what broke", "summary": "A developer who runs a 10-person video production company handed over core business operations to an AI agent for six months. The company replaced Slack and Notion with open-source alternatives, moved to Linux, and built a custom system called Orion that handles tasks, inventory, and project management. The developer reports that AI-assisted coding made building the system 10x faster, but emphasizes a 'Human-First, AI-Powered' philosophy rather than 'AI-first.'", "body_md": "The Experiment That Could Have Killed My Business\n\n[If you're interested, I also have a really good article here](https://theassociationwebmasters.blogspot.com/2026/06/i-spent-morning-chasing-ai-garage-sales.html)\n\nSix months ago, I made a decision that sounded insane to everyone around me.\n\nI started handing over pieces of my company to artificial intelligence.\n\nNot just the boring stuff. Not just the email drafts and meeting notes. I mean the *real* stuff. The systems. The processes. The infrastructure that keeps a 10-person video production company running without collapsing into chaos.\n\nAnd I didn't stop there.\n\nI moved almost every computer in my office to Linux. I killed Slack. I killed Notion. I replaced them with open-source alternatives running on my own servers. I built custom software. I connected everything to an AI agent that now runs the show.\n\nAfter six months, I can say with confidence:\n\nWe are now an AI-powered company.\n\nBut here's the twist. The term everyone uses for this is \"AI-first.\" I hate that term. It's marketing fluff, like \"cloud-based\" or \"blockchain\" back in the day.\n\nI prefer something else.\n\nWe are Human-First, AI-Powered.\n\nAnd today, I'm going to show you exactly what that means.\n\n## The Problem: Creative People Are Chaos Machines\n\nMy company makes YouTube videos. Lots of them.\n\nEvery video goes through the same process:\n\nAn idea\n\nResearch\n\nA script\n\nFilming (this video, right now)\n\nProduct shots\n\nEditing\n\nReview\n\nThumbnail + title\n\nPublishing\n\nSimple, right?\n\nWrong.\n\nBehind the scenes, there's purchasing, inventory management, finance, project management, sales, IT, and a thousand tiny decisions that keep everything from falling apart. And here's the thing about creative people — we're not exactly known for our organizational skills.\n\nWe miss deadlines. We get inspired at 2 AM and change everything. We lose track of gear. We forget what we said in a video three years ago.\n\nFor years, I tried to fix this with traditional software development tools.\n\nI implemented Agile. I used Scrum, Jira, Kanban, standup meetings — everything I learned from my years as a programmer. And it helped. A little.\n\nBut I always dreamed of something more.\n\nI dreamed of a custom application. One program that controlled everything — tasks, calendars, budgets, scripts, footage, inventory. All in one place. All perfectly organized.\n\nThe problem? Building that kind of software costs a fortune. You need a developer for six months, then more to maintain it. Most small companies can't afford that.\n\nI couldn't afford that.\n\nBut I could afford something else.\n\nAn AI.\n\n## How I Built the Impossible\n\nFirst, I did a full financial analysis of my company. Every expense, every subscription, everything we were wasting money on.\n\nI fed it all into an LLM and asked it to categorize every single expense. It cross-referenced emails, databases, and company names. It figured out what we were actually paying for and whether it was worth it.\n\nThat's when I discovered we were spending a ridiculous amount on apps like Slack and Notion.\n\nSo I killed them.\n\nI replaced Slack with Element (open source). I replaced Notion with Outline. I built custom integrations. I moved everything to open-source, self-hosted alternatives running on my own hardware.\n\nThen I built Orion.\n\nOrion started as a simple benchmark database. I'd test computers, run performance tests, and store the results. It became an inventory system. Then a task manager. Then a project tracker. Then a full operating system for the entire company.\n\nToday, Orion handles everything:\n\nVideo pipelines\n\nTeam tasks\n\nGoogle Calendar sync\n\nSales data\n\nInventory tracking\n\nEverything\n\nBut here's the thing — I built all of this with AI.\n\nI tell the AI what I need. It writes the code. I review it. We iterate. What used to take me months now takes days.\n\n10x faster. No joke.\n\n## The Brain in the Basement\n\nRemember that server I mentioned?\n\nIt's a monster. Threadripper CPU. 96 cores. 96GB of VRAM on an RTX 6000 Pro. The most powerful graphics card you can put in a PC before you need a datacenter.\n\nInside that server runs something called Janus.\n\nJanus is my AI assistant. But \"assistant\" is an understatement. Janus is the brain of the entire company.\n\nHere's what Janus can do:\n\nAccess every video we've ever made\n\nSearch transcriptions and pull clips instantly\n\nKnow which products we've covered\n\nAnswer any question about company operations\n\nTranscribe audio\n\nSend WhatsApp messages\n\nAlert the team when something is confirmed\n\nFind things from old videos\n\nRemember decisions so we don't repeat mistakes\n\nAnd every Monday morning, Janus runs a routine:\n\n\"Here are the videos that should have been published last week. Here are the tasks that didn't get done. Is it realistic to hit this week's deadlines? If not, let's reschedule. And by the way, I checked your calendar — you have a dentist appointment on Thursday. Don't forget.\"\n\nJanus doesn't just track tasks. It understands context. It knows when I'm traveling. It knows when we're behind. It knows when the team needs breathing room.\n\nAnd I am the only one who talks to it.\n\n## The AI Editor That Saves Hours\n\nFilming this video took me 1 hour and 20 minutes.\n\nThat's 80 minutes of me talking, repeating myself, messing up, going off-track, and generally being a human.\n\nMy editor used to spend hours cutting this down to a clean 30-minute video.\n\nNow we have an AI tool that:\n\nWatches the entire raw footage\n\nTranscribes every word\n\nDetects repetitions and mistakes\n\nMakes a first cut\n\nImports product clips and b-roll automatically\n\nGenerates a DaVinci Resolve project file\n\nThe editor still does a second pass. He still makes creative decisions. But the AI saves him hours of boring, repetitive work.\n\nHe can focus on making it good, not making it exist.\n\n## The Digital Clone\n\nHere's where it gets crazy.\n\nWe have a database that contains everything we've ever said in a video. Every review, every opinion, every benchmark, every off-hand comment.\n\nWhen I ask Janus about a video I made three years ago, it finds it instantly.\n\nWhen the team needs b-roll of a specific product, it's already indexed and ready.\n\nWhen sales needs to know if we've covered a certain brand, they ask Janus.\n\nIt's like having a digital clone of the entire company.\n\nAnd this is where the \"Human-First\" part comes in.\n\n## The Line I Refuse to Cross\n\nPeople ask me all the time: \"Do you use AI to write your scripts?\"\n\nNo. Absolutely not.\n\nI tried. The AI wrote something generic, predictable, and soulless. It had no personality. No edge. No *me*.\n\nAnd honestly? The AI thought my ideas were terrible.\n\nI once made a video about a MacBook Pro and didn't mention the performance at all. I spent the whole video talking about the engineering, the curvature of the chassis, the angle of the edges — and how it represented a return to Apple's PowerPC era.\n\nThe AI told me it was a bad idea.\n\nThat video got millions of views.\n\nAI can't predict what makes humans connect. It can't replicate your personality, your sense of humor, your weird obsessions, your off-beat takes. That's what makes us creators unique.\n\nSo I drew a line.\n\nThe creative part is for humans. The boring part is for AI.\n\nScripts? Human. Concepts? Human. Art direction? Human.\n\nEditing, organization, scheduling, research, data management? AI.\n\n## The Team's AI Nudge\n\nCreative people are chaotic. We don't check our tasks. We don't move our cards. We don't update our status.\n\nIt drives me crazy.\n\nSo I built Fama.\n\nFama is an AI that follows up with the team. It sends them messages:\n\n\"Hey, how's that edit going? Any blockers? Let me know and I'll update your tasks.\"\n\nThey respond with a voice note. Fama transcribes it. It updates the task board. It tells me what's happening.\n\nI don't have to be a manager with a whip. The AI does it for me.\n\nAnd they don't even mind. It's a bot. They can ignore it if they want. But it keeps things moving.\n\n## What This Means for the Future\n\nLook, I'm not saying AI is going to replace everyone.\n\nBut I am saying that a single person with technical skills can now do what used to require a whole team.\n\nBefore AI, a small company like mine couldn't afford a full-time developer. Building custom software was a luxury. Now? One person with the right knowledge can automate massive parts of the business in weeks, not months.\n\nThe new job isn't \"programmer.\" It's \"AI implementer.\"\n\nSomeone who understands the business, understands the systems, and knows how to make AI solve real problems.\n\nAnd that's exactly what I want to teach.\n\n## The Big Question\n\nAfter six months, I've learned something important:\n\nAI will change work. It already is.\n\nPeople are losing jobs. That's real. But new opportunities are opening too. People who understand how to integrate AI into real businesses — not just prompt engineering, but actual systems — are going to be incredibly valuable.\n\nI built a system that my company couldn't have dreamed of a year ago. I did it with almost no budget. I did it with AI.\n\nAnd I'm just getting started.\n\nSo here's the question I keep asking myself:\n\nCan anyone do this?\n\nDo you need to be a programmer? Do you need a computer science degree? Do you need to understand networking and cybersecurity and databases?\n\nOr can someone with curiosity, determination, and a few good prompts learn enough to build something remarkable?\n\nI think the answer is yes.\n\nAnd that's what I'm going to explore next.\n\n## The Takeaway\n\nSix months ago, I was skeptical. I thought AI might be all hype. I thought it might be like crypto — a flashy trend that fades.\n\nI was wrong.\n\nAI is real. It's here. And it's changing how small businesses can operate.\n\nBut it's not replacing humans. Not yet. Maybe not ever.\n\nIt's making humans more powerful.\n\nMy company is Human-First, AI-Powered.\n\nWe do the creative work. We make the art. We have the weird ideas that nobody else has.\n\nAnd the AI does everything else.\n\nThat's the future I want to live in.\n\nYour Turn\n\nAre you using AI in your business? Or are you still waiting to see if it's worth it?\n\nDrop a comment below — I reply to everyone.\n\nAnd if you want to learn how to build systems like this, I'm working on something. Stay tuned.\n\nThe Verdict: AI doesn't replace humans. It replaces boring tasks. And that's a future worth building.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke", "canonical_source": "https://theassociationwebmasters.blogspot.com/2026/06/i-gave-my-company-to-ai-for-6-months.html", "published_at": "2026-06-20 16:09:35+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-20 16:37:29.458459+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "developer-tools", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Orion", "Slack", "Notion", "Element", "Outline", "Linux", "Threadripper", "LLM"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-let-ai-run-my-company-for-6-months-here-s-what-broke.jsonld"}}