AI without the theatre

The most useful AI projects we’ve shipped lately look nothing like the demos. They’re intake assistants reading PDFs. They’re chatbots answering policy questions from a private knowledge base. They’re classifiers turning noisy free-text into structured rows. They’re boring. They work.

What we look for

• A task someone does today that costs hours per day.
• A clear success metric — ideally something already tracked.
• A boring failure mode (human takes over) instead of a confident wrong answer.
• Private data we can ground the model in.

What we avoid

• “Chat with our website” projects with no operational ask behind them.
• Models hallucinating into production without a fallback.
• Pilots that have no measurable owner.

If your AI idea sounds like a press release, that’s a hint. If it sounds like a tired ops team’s wish list, that’s usually the start of something that ships.