I know how work moves through a business.

For twenty-five years I worked every part of the furniture business, from showroom floors to factories overseas, and spent twelve of them running a furniture company.

At Boliya, a furniture company with $4M in annual sales selling to around forty retailers plus Wayfair, Houzz, and Gilt, I worked behind the selling rather than in it. Five or six times a year I was in China, inspecting product, working on prototypes, and improving the production process. The rest was product design and quality control, and the retail presentation books, digital and physical, that went out to a hundred stores. I trained the retail staff who sold it, around thirty stores in a typical year. Before Boliya, I ran showrooms for Ligne Roset and BoConcept.

AI got my attention and held it. Most of what people want it for was never a technology problem. It’s a process that stalls in the same place every time, or a job somebody redoes every Tuesday. Knowing which of those is worth handing to a system takes time inside a business. And the more interesting question is usually not what the technology can do. It’s what you’d do with the week if that job stopped landing on you.