"It's time to start investing in AI"
A growing wave of questions from sales prospects nudged us to ship the platform's very first AI feature. Wide-open brief, tiny team, four-month runway — a great recipe for shipping something unfocused. So I set rules: whatever I built had to be high-frequency, small enough to ship fast, genuinely useful to existing customers, and obvious in a demo. Resources and scope down, visibility and value up.
Finding the friction
I found it in our most-used view, at the moment people add a cover image to an article they're publishing to their whole company. I'd seen the pause firsthand — what image, how big, where do I find one? — then people settling for boring text covers or watermarked stock they didn't have rights to.
So I automated the process I already did myself: take the title, generate search terms, pull suggestions from a stock library, surface them in-platform
The decision I'm proudest of
My first pitch loaded the AI suggestions the instant the dialog opened. Building it with my developer, that turned out to be wrong twice over: every open would trigger an API charge, and it was jarring — people expected their own content first, not surprise images. So I restructured it around a segmented control. You land on your own covers; you step into "Suggestions" only when you actually want AI, which is what triggers the call.
It respected the user's mental model and meant we only paid when intent was real. Good UX and good unit economics, same decision.
How it landed
Shipped in four months. Customers adopted it fast, and a few asked to keep it at renewal — rare enthusiasm for an intranet feature. It gave sales something real to demo, and the company its first AI capability to build on.
That's the TLDR version. The full one had a few plot twists — a scrappy build that kept surprising us, trade-offs I'd defend to this day, and some things I'd absolutely do differently. Those are stories better told in conversation.
People rarely email to say they love something in their intranet. This time, they did.
If you've made it all the way to the end, you're a special one. Thanks for taking the time.
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