GM. This is Needs to Exist (aka NTE), delivering you a startup idea that’ll make every business half-robot

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Your New AI Exec Arrived

The One Liner

Your AI exec you can fire anytime.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

Boardroom wants AI. Team is overwhelmed. Tools are chaos.
We show up, fix workflows, ship automation, and make the business faster by default.
No decks. Results.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem

Every company suddenly wants to “do AI.” Except nobody knows what that means.

The CEO is reading trend reports. The ops team is drowning in copy-paste hell. Vendors are promising “revolutionary transformation” and delivering a Zapier flow with a cape on.

Hiring a real CAIO? Good luck. They’re all locked inside Google or getting paid to speak on panels.

So what happens? Companies buy thirteen AI tools. Nobody uses them. Productivity goes down but spend goes up. And the only thing automated is the panic.

Everyone is terrified of being the last company still printing PDFs. But nobody wants to be the first one to break payroll.

This leaves a big, expensive gap: Executives want outcomes. Employees want relief. Nobody wants another slide deck.

The Solution

A fractional Chief AI Officer that behaves like a closer, not a consultant.

We audit every department with a simple rule: If the work sucks, the bots should do it.

Then we design:

• AI copilots that think

• Automations that actually save time

• Workflows that don’t rely on Susan’s magic spreadsheet skills

We install the new system. Train the humans. Measure the gains. And we’re gone until you need us again

No hype. No AI theater. Just a business that works like it’s from the future.

How We’d Build It (Product + GTM Evolution)

Stage 1 — The Unreasonable Specialist

Product:

• Hands-on workflow teardown

• Deploy proven AI agents inside existing tools

• Leadership briefings that translate “AI” into “money”

Tools secretly doing the heavy lifting:
- Klu.ai for intelligent routing and evaluation
- Relevance AI for agentic workflows
- Zed for system mapping while everyone’s talking
- Essex Engine to glue enterprise chaos into automation

GTM:
- Direct sells to ops-driven CEOs
- One promise: unlock 10–30% more margin or don’t pay us

Pricing:
Audits: $25k–$100k
Automations: $75k–$500k
Retainers: $10k–$30k/mo

Stage 2 — The Repeatable Machine

Product:
- Industry playbooks (legal ops, insurance claims, healthcare admin)
- Copilots for finance, sales, HR, customer service
- Annual “dumb work deletion plans” with hard ROI signatures

Tools:
- AirOps for copilots that actually do work
- Hex for dashboards CFOs brag about to their boards

GTM:
- PE partners funneling us portfolio companies
- Install once, expand everywhere

Stage 3 — The Empire Builder

Product:
- Custom agents that become core IP
- The AI command center: one brain to run the enterprise
- The org becomes upgradeable like software

Tools:
- Dust for model orchestration that adapts on the fly
- Baseten to productionize without hiring an army

GTM:
- Every department becomes a contract renewal
- This is where a company becomes half-robot, half-cash-printer.

Why It Needs to Exist

The companies that win are the ones who eliminate stupid work first.

Not the ones who have the most AI tools. The ones who have the least excuses.

AI can make every business radically more profitable, but only if someone owns the results.

Most companies need a Chief AI Officer. They just need one who is distributed, upgradeable, and not afraid to delete the old way of working.

We’re not selling AI. We’re selling time, margin, and the future. And every company is already late.

If McKinsey and R2-D2 Had a Baby

Picture a conference room with too much glass and not enough soul.

At the table:

Blake — ex-McKinsey consultant who talks in frameworks and cries in spreadsheets
Dr. Kaori — robotics engineer who believes humans are buggy code
Taylor — Gen Z ops hire who refuses to open Excel “on principle”

The idea they’re here to debate:

A fractional Chief AI Officer.
Not a deck factory.
Not another “strategic transformation roadmap.”
But an AI-powered boss that shows up, deletes dumb work, and measures how much faster everyone gets.

Let the roast begin.

Blake (Consultant):

Look, I love the concept. Everybody wants AI transformation. But you can’t just… automate away the entire job market. What about governance? What about risk? What about the hundred-slide deck that gently whispers, “We’re working on it. Please approve Phase 2”?

Dr. Kaori (Roboticist):

Governance? Risk? Those are human excuses for slow shipping. Machines don’t do excuses. Machines do progress.

Every business has a marginal stupidity tax, confused workflows, tribal knowledge, Susan’s secret macro. Let the bots erase that.

Taylor (Gen Z Ops):

Okay but if a robot tries to email me a spreadsheet? Hard pass. I left my last job because they wanted me to “fix inconsistencies in the quarterly forecast.” Be so for real.

Blake:

You think automation is sexy until the board asks how it impacts EBITDA. Then you’ll wish you had a consultant with a Gantt chart and a soothing, monotone voice.

Dr. Kaori:

EBITDA is literally the scoreboard of automation. Bots don’t ignore checklists.
Bots don’t forget training. Bots don’t call in sick because they “accidentally” went to Coachella.

Taylor:

The real problem isn’t automation. It’s busywork disguised as productivity. I shouldn’t spend two hours renaming files for a boss who still prints emails. If the robots want that job? Be my guest.

The Core Debate

Do companies actually want transformation…. or just the theater of transformation?

Blake sees a world where executives fear messing up, so they pay for research, audits, and “strategic alignment.”

Kaori sees a world where executives fear falling behind, so automation becomes a fiduciary duty.

Taylor sees a world where everyone is lying about how much work they do anyway.

Final Arguments

Blake:
Humans understand nuance. Companies need leaders who build consensus and manage change. A bot can’t wrangle egos.

Kaori:
A bot would delete egos. Also delete meetings. Also delete the Wednesday status update that exists purely to justify existence.

Taylor:
If an AI boss deletes 60% of my workload…great. I’ll go focus on the fun part. Or record a podcast. Or start a skincare brand. Whatever pays better.

Verdict

If McKinsey and R2-D2 had a baby…it would arrive in a suit loaded with a model routing engine and invoice $250K to automate your coffee machine.

But it would also:
- free teams from nonsense
- raise margins without layoffs
- give companies a future where progress is default

This isn’t consulting. It’s results-as-a-service. And whether Blake likes it or not,
companies don’t need more strategy decks. They need fewer excuses.

The fractional CAIO isn’t optional.
It’s overdue.

The Idea Witness Protection Program

These ideas have seen too much.
They’ve been hiding in plain sight, praying someone ambitious comes knocking.

Here are their current undercover identities:

1. A calendar that predicts when coworkers will quit or retire
   Currently disguised as: That random spreadsheet HR swears is “up to date.”

2. An AI that turns podcast rants into Bloomberg-grade datasets
   Living in: A dusty Google Doc titled “maybe later?”

3. The app that charges you money every time you slack off on goals
   One pivot away from: Full supervillain revenge-arc energy.

These ideas are bored.
They want out.
They want a founder.

Give an idea a new identity.
Give yourself a new career.

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