Last week, Unprompted took our talents to South Florida for a Raymond James event at a steakhouse. Nothing says "serious business" quite like a medium rare and a room full of accomplished business owners talking about exit strategies. As we cut into our filets, we paused for a moment of gratitude; it felt like we'd made it to the big leagues.
Julia wore her New York uniform (all black of corse) to grace the sunshine state.
The day was filled with the usual panels: tax strategy, accounting, legal, banking. We were there to talk about the topic that's everywhere in the headlines, but that most business owners don't know what to actually do with: AI.
The AI Short Game vs. the AI Long Game
The core of the talk was about two different conversations happening around AI right now.
The first (and more obvious conversation) is about productivity: saving time on emails, generating marketing copy, automating follow-ups. That's real, immediate value, and we don't want to dismiss it. It improves how you work today and saves time and money, but it doesn’t fundamentally change a business or how it operates.
The second (and in our opinion, more exciting) conversation is about building systems. It's about taking your processes and the institutional knowledge that's been living in your head for the last 10 or 20 years and actually using AI to capture it in order to make it repeatable, scalable, and transferable.
That's the long game. And that's what can add real value to your business, the type that buyers will pay for.
The short game is like giving one person a power drill; it helps them work faster. But the long game is like building an assembly line, and it's what actually transforms a business.
Why This Is Possible Now
Until recently, business owners were stuck choosing between two bad options: expensive custom software or off-the-shelf SaaS platforms that do half of what you need.
A new wave of AI tools (what the industry calls "vibe coding") now make it possible to build personalized software scoped to exactly how your business operates, at a fraction of the cost and time. Even The New York Times podcast, The Daily, covered vibe coding on an episode this week. After watching an AI agent build a fully functional website in under two minutes, the host said: "I feel pretty blown away... It's probably the first time that I have felt awe at this technology since ChatGPT came out." Another AI aha moment.
Everyone’s in a Different Place
One thing that struck us at the event was the range of where people were in their AI journey. Some had never touched ChatGPT. Others were already using tools like NanoBanana to generate video and marketing assets. There's no single adoption path; people are coming at this from completely different starting points.
The point isn't to catch up to some imaginary standard or use AI for the sake of using AI. The point is to find the friction in your business and ask: is there a better way to do this now with the tools that are available?
We’ve Been Here Before
We tried to stress how revolutionary this moment actually is. By technological standards, we believe we’re at a crazy inflection point, like when the Wright brothers invented flight, when Tim Berners-Lee created the internet, or when Marie Curie discovered radioactivity.
Every one of those breakthroughs was met with skepticism and fear. And every one of them turned out to be transformative. The people who jumped in early and embraced the change were the ones who won out.
We're in that stage today with AI. And if you don't adopt these tools, your competitors will.
Here’s a short video we made (obviously using AI tools) to capture this sentiment:
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
