AI, Customer, and Hiring
I never watched a founder hand over their gut to a dashboard. Then the dashboard started running the company.
A regional grocer was rolling out a new loyalty app across 60 stores. Thin margin, high shrink, store managers already stretched.
They hired smart experts, and the experts brought clean numbers from Snowflake, neat funnels in Salesforce, and a playbook that looked like it came straight from Instacart.
Every meeting turned into “what the data says.” The founder stopped saying the thing they knew from the floor: customers were mad about substitutions, not offers.
So the team shipped personalization, new promos, and prettier browse. Refunds stayed high because the messy ops problem never got owned.
Data is great for selecting from known options. Data is terrible at protecting the one weird bet that only the founder can see.
The turning point was not firing experts. It was hiring an external advisor who challenged the metrics and helped the founder put their dream back into a shippable sequence.
It makes me wonder how often “data-driven” is just judgment deferred.