The mid-market operator's guide to automation that actually ships. The boring AI nobody brags about — and why it wins.
The Mid-Market Operator's Guide to Automation That Actually Ships
Available on Amazon — paperback & Kindle
You've been handed a mandate and a budget, and most of the advice on offer is noise — written from a stage, by people who've never had to support a deployment at two in the morning when it breaks. This book is the opposite. It's an operator's field guide for the mid-market firm that has to make AI produce real, defensible value, without a research lab or a chief technology officer to lean on.
The thesis is contrarian on purpose: the AI that pays for itself isn't the impressive one. It's the unglamorous work — cleaning data, handling exceptions, routing tasks, governing the whole thing — that nobody brags about and that quietly produces measurable returns. The exciting projects photograph well and die in the pilot. The boring ones ship and last.
What gives the book its weight is the standard it holds itself to: every case, statistic, and claim comes from a public, dated, verifiable source. No anonymized client stories you're asked to take on faith. You can check the work — and you should.
The Reality & the Boring-AI Thesis — why most mid-market AI projects fail, and the pattern that makes them work.
The Operating Stack — Assess → Illuminate → Accelerate → Sustain, the method behind every engagement.
How AI Actually Works in 2026 — agents, orchestration, human-in-the-loop, evals, in plain operator language.
Governance That Holds Up — NIST, ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, and OWASP, translated for the mid-market.
Vertical Playbooks — healthcare, legal & accounting, engineering, consulting, manufacturing & logistics — plus a chapter for any industry not named.
Make It Real — role-by-role guidance and a first-90-days plan you can start on Monday.
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The method in this book is the one I use as a virtual Chief AI Officer with every mid-market client. Read it first — it takes a few hours. If you want to talk through applying it in your firm, book a call.
The no-sell promise: if we get on a call and it isn't a fit for what I do, I'll tell you in the first ten minutes and point you to a better path. I have nothing to sell into the wrong fit.
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