Data Before Intelligence
You will want to start with the impressive part: the AI. The order is backwards. The intelligence is only ever as good as the boring, decomposed data underneath it.
If you are building something with AI in it, you are going to want to build the impressive part first. The agent. The thing that answers questions and generates the quote and feels like the future. It is the part you can show someone. I wanted to build it first too, and it took me a while to admit the order was backwards.
Here is the thing nobody tells you up front: the intelligence is only ever as good as the data underneath it, and that data almost certainly does not exist yet in any usable form. Mine lived in spreadsheets, in file names, in one person’s memory of how a particular job is really priced. So before any agent could be trusted with a question, I had to do the part nobody asks to see: take the product apart into its atoms, every material, every labor step, every overhead dollar, and put it somewhere a machine could read without guessing. You will have to do the same, and it will not look impressive to anyone, including you.
It was months of unglamorous work. Decomposing things that “everyone already knows.” Arguing with my own assumptions. At one point I found a time estimate I had quietly trusted for years was off by roughly threefold, not because anyone was careless, but because no one had ever made the number meet reality. That is the kind of thing the boring work surfaces, and you only find it by doing the boring work.
Then comes the part that will surprise you. Once the data was right, the clever layer got almost dull. The “AI” was not doing anything magical. It was reading clean, structured, honest data and stating what was already true. The intelligence felt smart because the groundwork was solid, not the other way around.
This is the thing the demos get wrong. They show you the model. They never show you the six months of decomposition that make the model worth listening to. So if you take one instruction from this, take the order, because it is the part that is easy to get backwards: get the foundation right first, and have the patience to do it before you have earned anything visible for the effort.
Data before intelligence. Not as a slogan. As the actual order the work has to happen in.