I had three conversations last week that told completely different stories about AI adoption.
A business owner looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. A mold remediation business owner sat across from me at lunch and found out his marketing agency had been quietly routing his traffic to another franchise owner in his network. And a room full of trades and professional services owners at an AI breakfast club made me realize the competitive gap is opening faster than most people think.
All three happened in the same week. All three are true at the same time.
That is what early actually looks like.
The 8 heads problem
When I tell most business owners what I do, I still get the look. You know the one. Polite confusion. A nod that means nothing. The conversation pivots somewhere safer.
It is easy to mistake that for the market not being ready. I used to think that. I do not think that anymore.
The 8 heads reaction is not skepticism. It is distance. These are people running real businesses, solving real problems every day, and the thing I am describing does not connect to any problem they are currently aware of having. That is not a market problem. That is a communication problem.
What I learned this week is that the fix is not a better explanation. It is a prototype. When you put something real in front of a business owner, something that does a thing they actually need done, right in front of them, the 8 heads disappear. You stop describing the art of the possible and start showing it. That one shift changes everything about how the conversation goes.
They will get there. Most of them just need to see it working first.
Which is why the lunch mattered.
Then I had lunch
I sat down with the owner of a mold remediation business this week. Not a tech founder. Not someone who follows AI on X. A guy who runs crews, manages jobs, and has been doing this long enough to know exactly where the friction is in his business.
Before we even got to what he wanted to build, I ran a quick SEO and AEO audit of his website. SEO you probably know. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization is the newer layer. It is how AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide which businesses to recommend when someone asks a question instead of typing a search query. As more people search that way, AEO is becoming as important as traditional SEO. Most businesses have no idea where they stand on it.
The audit took minutes. What it found was not a minor issue.
His marketing agency had his site structured in a way that was routing traffic to another franchise owner in his network. His own marketing spend was quietly working against him. He had no idea. The agency had never flagged it. His main competitor in the area was also outperforming him significantly on AEO, meaning when someone in his market asked an AI tool to recommend a mold remediation company, his business was not the answer coming back.
He had been paying for this problem.
That is the moment the conversation changed. Not because I pitched him on AI strategy. Because I showed him something real that he could not unsee. Everything after that was just him telling me what he wanted to fix.
By the end of lunch he had a full build list.
A custom inspection app built around how his crews actually work in the field. An integration and migration of an interpretation agent into his existing workflow. A personal assistant to handle document cleanup, storage, calendar, and task management. An SEO and AEO agent to fix what the audit exposed and keep it fixed going forward. And a voice agent receptionist for his phones so calls get handled properly whether his team is on a job or not.
None of that is a feature request for existing software. It is a replacement order.
Every single item on that list is now buildable. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Now. The tools exist, the cost is accessible, and the only thing standing between him and a custom operating system built around his specific business is someone who knows how to specify what he knows and encode it into something that runs.
Six months ago that conversation ends differently. The list gets shorter because half of it is not feasible. This week it just kept going.
That is what Encoded Expertise looks like in the wild. Not a framework on a slide. A lunch with a business owner who is ready to stop bending his business to fit someone else's software.
The ones who show up
The AI breakfast club I have been attending is not full of software people. It is trades owners and professional services operators. HVAC, plumbing, legal, accounting. People whose competitors are almost certainly not spending their Tuesday mornings learning this.
That is the whole point.
The conversation in that room is not about whether AI is worth paying attention to. That question is already settled for the people who show up. The conversation is about where to start, what is actually buildable, and how fast things are moving.
Traditional software was built on a specific assumption, that you would adapt your business to fit the product. The workflows, the naming conventions, the reporting structure — you bent yourself around what the software could do. For a long time that was the only option so everyone accepted it.
That assumption is breaking. For the first time it is actually cheaper and faster to build something that fits your business than to keep forcing your business into something that almost fits.
The plumber or accountant who figures that out first is not going to have a slightly better software stack than their competitors. They are going to operate in a fundamentally different way. Faster decisions, fewer errors, institutional knowledge that scales beyond the owner. The competitor who skipped the Tuesday morning breakfast is not going to see it coming until the gap is already too wide to close.
Early does not mean the opportunity is small. It means the window is open.
The 8 heads crowd and the mold remediation business owner exist at the same time. One is not more real than the other. That tension is exactly what early looks like.
The ones who are ready are not waiting for permission. They are already building the list.
If you want to know where your business stands on SEO and AEO and whether your current marketing setup is working for you or against you. You can run a free audit, it takes two minutes and the results are immediate.
Or just reply to this email or send me a DM on Linkedin. I am doing a limited number of diagnostic conversations this month with operators who are serious about closing the gap. No pitch. Just the conversation.
See you next Tuesday.
Nick
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