My Last 180 Days With the Future of AI

For the past eighteen months I've been working hands-on with a frontier AI model that may become a household name. Most days it doesn't feel like sci-fi. It feels like paperwork, debugging prompts, and trying to get very smart systems to behave in very human spaces. But every so often it does something that genuinely feels like magic.

By magic, I don't mean tricks or hype. I mean the moments where I run a question all the way through our Consensus Engine™ and it hands back an option I never would have considered in a million years—and it's better than anything I had on the table. Same constraints, same facts, completely different vantage point.

Raw Power Isn't the Point

A single modern AI model is already a Ferrari. Most people never get close to driving it in fifth gear, and that's okay. Raw power isn't the point. Vantage points are. What we care about at Bespoke Ethos is how many honest angles we can look at a problem from without ever hiding the reasoning.

The Consensus Engine is what happens when you coordinate a small fleet of those Ferraris instead of just one. You don't need to learn to drive like a race-car driver. You're effectively hiring someone to run three cars in the same race and bring back first, second, and third place perspectives in a calm, cited brief you can actually use.

Why We Built It for Davids, Not Goliaths

There are already tools built for the Goliaths: hedge funds, global consultancies, and teams with Bloomberg terminals. I built the Consensus Engine because I wanted that level of research and perspective for people who don't have a quant team in the next building. I wanted it for my own work first, and then for the founders who kept asking questions that were too big for a yes/no answer.

It's not designed for superficial "What should I tweet today?" questions. It's designed for the decisions where you find yourself pacing at 2 AM: Should we raise prices? Kill this product? Enter a new market? Hire before we're comfortable? The engine surrounds those questions with perspectives, tradeoffs, and recommendations instead of vibes and hunches.

Ethics, Alignment, and Walking Away

Working this close to the frontier comes with responsibility. We've said no to projects where the intended use of AI didn't line up with our ethics. Sometimes that meant walking away from very attractive work. I'm not telling you that to sound noble; I'm telling you because it's part of the product. The same values that make us decline certain projects are the values baked into how we design your automations and research flows.

Bespoke Ethos wasn't named by accident. Our job is to bend the path a few degrees toward better, not to hand over more levers to whoever shouts "disruption" the loudest. That's why every engagement still has human approvals, audit trails, and the ability to say, "Pause, this doesn't feel right," without taking your whole business offline.

What This Means for You Right Now

If you're a small-business founder, you shouldn't have to become an AI expert to benefit from what I've been seeing at the edge. You also shouldn't be a test subject for half-baked tools. My job—and the job of Bespoke Ethos—is to turn what we learn in that frontier work into calm, trustworthy workflows and decision briefs that fit into the business you already run.

If you're curious what the Consensus Engine or our automations might do for your specific situation, you don't have to start with a giant commitment. Bring one real question or one messy workflow. We'll show you what these systems can do for you today, in plain English, with receipts.

That's what my last 180 days with the future of AI have really been about: taking something that feels like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory from the inside and opening the gates just enough that small businesses can walk through safely. No golden ticket required.