Rebuilding the Ship at Sea

Starting a company right now is a strange privilege.

You can build the whole ship around AI before you ever leave port. Customer support runs on LLMs from day one. Sales qualification is automatic. There’s no existing team that has to change how they work, because there’s no existing team. Just the system, and a person or two who knows how to steer it.

Then you launch.

But most businesses don’t get to do that. They’re already at sea.

Take a SaaS company with 40 support agents, five years of Zendesk customization, and SOPs that work. That ship isn’t docking so you can rebuild it from scratch. It can’t stop. So you figure out how to change course while moving.

There are a couple of ways to try.

The first is to rebuild at sea. You layer AI onto the operation without stopping it. An AI triage system that routes and categorizes tickets before any human touches them. A copilot that surfaces relevant docs and drafts initial responses. The 40 agents are still there, they’re just spending more time on the cases that actually need them.

This is slow and convoluted. The workflows assumed human judgment at every single step, and you end up spending time and money duct-taping AI into a system that was never built AI-first, yours or your vendors’.

Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom - they're all rebuilding at sea too. you're duct-taping AI onto their duct tape.

The second approach is to build a new ship at port while the old one sails. Design a truly AI-native support operation from scratch. New tooling, new workflows, a much smaller headcount. Maybe zero.

When it’s ready, you start routing new customers in. Gradually, the old ship winds down.

Sounds clean. What will likely happen is you’ll find out how much of your support quality lived inside your senior agents’ heads and never made it into any SOP. You’ll scramble to pull in data through APIs you didn’t think you needed until the model started failing without them.

New businesses don’t have to solve any of this. They get to pick the destination before they leave the dock, build the ship around it, and go. That’s a real advantage, and I’m genuinely excited to see how it plays out in the market.