A while ago, someone on our team proudly pitched an “AI-powered” feature.
There was a slide deck. It had animations. Someone said “neural networks” while air-doodling loops with their hands.
Another person compared it to “how Tesla thinks.”
We were four minutes in and still had no idea what the feature actually did.
So I asked, “Okay, but what problem are we solving?”
Long pause. Funnel diagram. Buzzwords.
Then finally: “It’s… future-ready.”
I didn’t have the heart to ask what that meant.
Because I already knew the real issue:
They weren’t thinking like builders.
They were thinking like LinkedIn influencers.
The truth? You don’t need to “become” an AI company.
You just need to stop acting like you’re launching a Mars mission every time someone says automation.
Half the businesses preaching “AI-first” still have teams emailing Excel sheets titled “FINAL_v3_NO_REALLY_PLEASE_APPROVE_THIS_ONE.xlsx.”
Thinking like an AI company means:
Ask sharper questions
Build smaller tests
Learn faster
And stop scheduling alignment calls to decide if you need another alignment call
At Ergode, one of our engineers got tired of fixing the same inventory mismatch every week.
So he built a scrappy script to auto-resync product counts across systems.
No one asked him to.
No budget. No meeting. No Jira ticket.
We didn’t even know the bug was that bad—until it just… disappeared.
No roadmap. No Jira epic. Just instinct, feedback, and a bug so persistent, it basically had a cubicle—until someone finally said, “Not this again.”
Now that’s AI thinking.
One of our interns once used ChatGPT to summarize 300 resumes in two hours.
Why? Because the hiring manager ghosted halfway through the shortlisting process.
He wasn’t told to do it. He just didn’t want to spend his weekend reading cover letters that all started with “Dear Hiring Team, I am passionate about…”
The summaries were cleaner. The shortlist was sharper.
He even flagged one resume with a side project so interesting we created a new role for the person.
The intern got a full-time offer.
The hiring manager got… a polite calendar reminder. 🙂
Prototype like it’s a joke. If it can’t survive your most cynical teammate’s smirk, it won’t survive your customers.
Ship scrappy. Learn loudly. If your V1 looks good, you probably waited too long.
Build feedback loops into everything. Great AI learns. Great companies do too.
Delete your darlings. AI throws out what doesn’t work. Humans cling. Don’t be human.
Everyone’s out here trying to look “AI-smart.”
The real winners?
They’re the ones thinking like builders and moving like pirates.
Don’t wait for permission. Don’t aim for perfection.
Think faster. Test smaller. And if someone pitches “future-ready,” ask them if that includes solving today.
Regards,
Rupesh
P.S.
If you’re someone who prototypes in Notion, breaks things in staging, and fixes bugs while your boss is still drafting the kickoff email—let’s talk. We don’t hire roles. We hire brains that move.
