The Best AI Success Stories Are Sitting on Hard Drives and Have 1 User

I had coffee with my favorite CTO yesterday and he told me about his new AI app. It’s basically a CTO-in-a box. And it’s awesome. And he’s the only one using it. And it’s going to stay that way. Despite my trying to persuade him otherwise. One of the reasons there’s so little proof of the value of AI is that the best, most useful, most ingenious apps actually never leave the creator’s hard drive. In fact, once my friend pointed out what he was doing, I myself realized that most of what I’ve created with AI is available only to me on my hard drive, and moreover, that’s definitely where my best stuff is. In fact, it seems like most of the better “AI apps” aren’t even primarily AI, but AI being implemented, like my CTO friend implemented it, to unlock automation and unstructured data — and ultimately narrative output — in a way that couldn’t be done before. So why is this happening? The Genius of CTO-in-a-Box I’m probably overhyping this because he’s my buddy and he kindly listens to a lot of my BS before it gets to you folks, but my CTO friend’s CTO-in-a-box isn’t anything to eff with. He and I worked shoulder-to-shoulder for years, and together we developed some amazing little features, a few apps, and the tech backbone of a multimillion-dollar business. I say “we” but all I did was dream stuff up with him, vet it, and MVP it out, after which he and his brilliant team coded it. And they got it right the first time every time, and he usually added his own flair to surprise me with some technical trick no one would ever notice but made what we were doing 10 times better under the hood. He left that company not long after I did, and despite my trying to wrangle him into what I was doing, he took another job, to come in and do a technical turnaround on a private equity-purchased startup that had tons of potential but was stagnating. He hadn’t done anything like a turnaround before and I had just finished one. We have coffee every two weeks and so our conversations turned to the science of the turnaround. Then he disappeared for a month, and when we got back together, yesterday, he shocked the hell out of me. “Basically, what I did was take every bit of data, company data, sales data, all the code, all the documentation — they had a lot of ‘stuff’ [his air quotes] just sitting in directories and databases,” he told me. “I slammed it all into a vector database, wrote some code, integrated Claude Code to build some agents and totally write the front end, and now the LLM is like my personal assistant.” He’s underselling it. I know this because of the example he gave me. Builders Gonna Build “We had a sudden spike in resources, so I asked it what was going on, and it brought me to the right section of code that was the problem and hypothesized why, and I fixed it in 30 seconds,” he said. And then he made me jealous. “Oh, it also does all my weekly status reports and my standup agenda and all the reporting I have to do for the ELT and the board,” he continued. “I don’t let it send emails, but it’ll create the draft for me to review with the summary and a link to the report.” “Tell me you built it so anyone can use it,” I said. “Of course,” he responded. “I mean, not for all the outliers, but yeah you could start over and import new data, it knows what it’s getting and what to do with it.” “Tell me it’s self-perpetuating with new data it creates on its own,” I said, “like those email summaries and reports.” He just smiled. “Dude,” I said and threw my hands up. “It’s a CTO-in-a-box. Let me at it.” “No,” he laughed. “It’s staying on my hard drive.” “But you built it like a product.” “Because that’s how I roll.” Then he took a smug sip of his mocha whatever and I couldn’t help not being mad at him. Don’t Be So Quick to Write Off AI I say this as the guy who can’t stop writing off AI. Nah, I’ve been disparaging how we’ve been selling AI for years now, having been building it since 2010, and, in a nascent sense, as far back as 2000. But each time I’ve firebombed today’s AI hype in public, especially generative AI — because that’s the “AI” everyone is familiar with and what 95 percent of people are talking about when they say “AI” — I’ve prefaced my flaming with how amazing the technology actually can be when you know what you’re doing. In the hands of my CTO friend, amazing doesn’t even begin to describe what you can do. For the record, he’s on the uppermost subscription level of at least five different providers, a four-figure-a-month bill footed by his private equity overlords. And he’s aware that he will be squeezed soon. In fact, he said openly, “I got on the gravy train while the platforms are loss-leading.” They’ll price him out, and that’s another reason not to build a public product around it. He doesn’t know the true economics. Do What the CTOs Are Doing Of course, I asked my CTO friend to send me his documentation, because of course he documented it, and I’m building something around content and creators that could use its own CTO-in-a-box. And that got me thinking. Right now, all the coding I’ve done with the AI and the agents and such, it’s all sitting on my hard drive, and like my friend, I’ve built it like a product but I’m the only user in the credentials table. But unlike my friend, I built it like a product because I am indeed thinking of packaging it and selling it as a product down the road. If I could just stop writing for a while and get my brain on it for more than five minutes. Which, in today’s world, actually gets a lot of Claude coding done. It’s the peer review that takes time, if you get me. If I’ve got advice, it’s this. If you want to build something with AI, find the people who are doing amazing things on their hard drive — facing real challenges, solving real problems, and not just leveraging AI to jump on the gravy train. Buy them a mocha whatever and ask them what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Because the more my CTO friend spoke, the more my vision was clouded by dollar signs. The problem is that for every story like his I hear 100 more stories about chatbot wrappers and unstructured data parsers being sold like they’re magic. Those aren’t being funded anymore, finally. That opens the door for people to wring real value and usage out of this AI nonsense. If you’re a fan of real value and usage, jump on my email list. I try to talk about that as much as possible, whether that’s AI or tech or something else. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO