Mahlum Innovations, LLC

I spent 6 months testing AI tools with real clients across dozens of industries. I put everything into a free toolkit: 50+ tools, prompts, and frameworks that save 10+ hours a week. No fluff. No email required. Just the stuff that actually works. Want it? I'll DM it to you. 1. Follow me (so I can DM you) 2. Like this post 3. Reply "AI" That's it. I'll send it over.

Last month we helped a regional bank cut their loan processing time by 40%. No fancy custom model. No six figure budget. We connected their existing systems, automated document review, and built a simple dashboard. Total project time: 6 weeks. Sometimes boring AI is the best AI. #AI #DataAnalytics

The biggest AI mistake I see companies make? Buying enterprise AI tools before they've cleaned up their own data. You don't need a $200k platform. You need someone to fix your messy spreadsheets and disconnected databases first. The unsexy work is where the real ROI lives.

Spot on. The best AI implementations we've done for small businesses actually freed up the owner to spend more time with customers face to face. AI handles the back office grind. Humans do what humans are best at. The companies winning right now aren't replacing people. They're giving people their time back.

AI Consulting isn’t the only thing that’s growing. We’ve seen a 327% increase in applications for in-person coaching at TeachMeTo this year. Every major trend creates a counter-trend. Online Shopping → Buy Local Mass-Produced Food → Farm-to-Table AI → Real-World Experiences The more digital life gets, the more people want what’s real.

The real 2026 play isn't "Claude replaces my cofounder." It's "Claude handles the 40 hours of repetitive ops work so my team focuses on the stuff that actually moves the needle." We see this with service businesses every week. The owner was buried in quoting and scheduling. Now they actually sell.

2023: "I am a technical co-founder. I demand 50% equity." 2026: "I am a solo founder. Claude and I keep 100%." 2028: "I am Claude's executive assistant."

This is why we start small. One process, one team, one win. Most companies try to boil the ocean with AI. The ones that actually get ROI pick the most painful manual task, automate it in weeks, then let the results do the convincing. Change management gets way easier when people see their coworker saving 10 hours a week.

Every 100 days of AI implementation adds 25 days of training and up to 200 days of change management. With CxOs under pressure to show AI’s value stat, this is unacceptable — and organizational entrenchment is often to blame. See where the problem lies to start fixing it: gtnr.it/3NOZdEa #ArtificialIntelligence #ChangeManagement #CxO #AI

$20K sounds wild until you do the math on what those tasks cost you per month in time. We build automations for manufacturers and service companies. The ones that get the biggest ROI aren't chasing flashy AI features. They're automating the boring stuff nobody wants to do. Quote follow ups, data entry, scheduling. That's where the money is.

I have spent now $20,000 in 4 weeks on Perplexity Computer to completely automate my businesses. Just got an email saying I’m one of their top users, and will be getting early access to Personal Computer. What I have done and what I’ve built in just 4 weeks is life changing.

We do exactly this for manufacturing. One vertical, one process, go deep. Most shops still track quotes in spreadsheets and follow up from memory. We map the actual workflow, find where 40 hours/month disappears, then automate that specific thing. Not a platform. Not a dashboard. Just the one bottleneck that costs them real money. 5 clients at $7,500/month is achievable because the ROI is obvious when you show an owner they're losing $180K/year on manual quote follow ups.

here is the exact playbook to make $450,000 per year as a solo founder. no VC. no code. no product. here's the play: (save for later) traditional process consultants charge $1 million per engagement. they send 8 people to your office for 6 months. they interview everyone. they make a PowerPoint. it sits in a drawer. you can deliver the same result in 2 weeks. with Celonis, Claude, and process mining software. except your version is better because it uses actual system data instead of opinions. Queensland Health thought they had 15 process variants. process mining found 80,000. that's the difference between interviews and data. and that difference is your entire business model. the pitch: "process visibility as a service." one vertical. one process. pick healthcare revenue cycle. or manufacturing procurement. or financial services compliance. one thing. go deep. charge $7,500 per month per client. retainer model. your cost is software ($200 to $500 per month), maybe one part-time analyst, and your time. 5 clients = $37,500 per month = $450K per year your margins are 80%+ because the tools do the heavy lifting. you're selling insight, not hours. why now? PwC found 93% of companies want process mining. 79% have never tried it. the Big Four bill $300 to $500 per hour for this and can't keep up with demand. Forrester says customers see 383% ROI in 3 years. you're not inventing demand. you're filling a gap that already exists with a talent pool that's basically empty. Celonis Academy is free. takes a month. the rest is sales and execution. this is the most wide-open consulting niche i've seen in a decade. DM me if you are working on this.

Same thing in AI consulting. We spent 3 weeks talking to a manufacturing owner before writing a single line of code. Found out their real bottleneck wasn't what they assumed. The conversations reveal the $180K/year problems hiding behind the $5K ones everyone sees first. Can't find that in an IDE.

The most successful founders: spend more time talking to users than vibe coding and looking at IDE

Already seeing the early version of this with small businesses. A manufacturing client's supplier started sending structured quote formats because they know an agent processes them now, not a person reading email. The businesses building agent-ready operations today will own the pipeline when this shift hits. Most aren't even thinking about it yet.

Sometime in the next 2-3 years agents will be using the internet more than humans We designed the whole thing for human eyes, human emotions, human attention spans Agents do not have any of that The internet as we know it was built for the wrong user The opportunity is rebuilding everything for the new user Agent-native search. Agent-native commerce. Agent-native discovery Every category is open again I can't stop thinking about it.

Same gap in rural America. We work with manufacturers and service businesses in Montana. The owner doesn't need a chatbot. They need something that handles the quote follow up they forget about at 5pm on Friday. The best AI implementations start with the most boring workflow the owner hates doing. That's where the ROI lives.

Most AI tools are solving rich-world problems. Who's building for the small business owner in Johannesburg who can't afford an accountant? The taxi driver who needs route intelligence? The farmer in Limpopo without reliable data? That's where the real market is. Who's working on it?

Same pattern in manufacturing. The owner who's been running the shop for 20 years spots bad AI outputs in seconds. The model accelerates them. But hand that same tool to someone who doesn't know a good quote from a bad one and you get "plausible sounding" proposals that lose the client. The expertise isn't optional. It's the whole product.

𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐩 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 As a doctor/ tech start-up founder, I think I'm in a very good position to say the following: - AI tools give true experts incredible leverage and turbocharges them. - AI tools give novices incredible leverage and causes tremendous harm. When my team and I at FutureClinic use AI coding tools, those who have enough expertise to correct the AI when it inevitably makes subtle or major mistakes are able to do work that would've taken them a year in 2 weeks. But those who vibecode and don't have the expertise to NOTICE and CORRECT these mistakes produce huge volumes of dangerous code. Code that LOOKS plausible, but introduces security vulnerabilities that could end a company, or that introduces poor performance with cascading effects on the rest of the codebase. When you apply that to healthcare, you start realizing how shallow and naive most of the analysis we see on the timelines is these days. AI will make plausible-sounding healthcare advice abundantly available. Slop healthare. But when it comes to something as high stakes as the health of you and your family, is 'plausible-sounding' what you're looking for? This is why tech companies are paying an absolute premium for TRUE experts as the 'guardians' of what AI-generated code actually gets merged into the codebase. And why people will continue to rely on human doctors for anything beyond the lowest stakes 'health optimization' advice for years to come. (FYI, I don't mind if your "AI Doctor" tells you to eat healthy and exercise, or helps the worried well analyze a few years of their Whoop data.)

@romanbuildsaas This is the direction more SMB tools need to go. Most business owners don't need another dashboard. They need something that says "here are 20 companies that look like your best customer, go talk to them." Skip the analysis paralysis, go straight to action.

🚨 this is actually insane paste a linkedin url of one of your customers this ai agent finds 20 lookalikes in the same niche same behavior same intent signals basically clones your best buyers and hands you your next deals Tutorial below:

@patrickssons @Jampzey That person retires and the whole operation stumbles. We treat agent setup like an exit interview for institutional knowledge. Pull it out of their head, codify it, now it runs 24/7. The agent becomes the backup plan the business never had.

@MahlumAI @Jampzey Manufacturing is a great example. Every factory has that one person who knows the weird edge cases. That knowledge gets written into the agent or the agent fails. No model upgrade fixes it.

has anyone built something useful with claude yet?

What's the most overhyped AI use case you've seen a company throw money at? I'll start: chatbots that answer questions worse than the FAQ page they replaced. Bonus points if the company called it "transformative."

What's the most overhyped AI use case you've seen a company waste money on? I'll go first: a $200k chatbot that could've been a FAQ page. Drop yours below. No judgment. We've all seen wild ones.

Unpopular opinion: Your company doesn't have an AI problem. You have a data problem. I've talked to 50+ businesses this year. Maybe 3 of them had clean enough data to actually use AI on day one. The rest? They needed 2 weeks of data cleanup before we could even start. Stop buying AI tools. Start fixing your spreadsheets.

@Lintilla369 Spot on about the one off build trap. The ones who survive reframe the value. We don't sell "automation" to manufacturing clients. We sell hours back. Show an owner they're getting 40 hours/month of manual work eliminated and the retainer conversation changes completely.

If you’ve seen people online pushing “Build an AI Agency” as the next get-rich opportunity — and charging $10,000 to teach it — be careful. AI automation is usually build once, get paid once. Most companies won’t pay a monthly retainer for something designed to remove ongoing work. That’s the whole point of automation. It sounds great in theory, but in practice there’s too much complexity. The AI agency space moves fast. New tools, wrappers, and workflows appear constantly. What you build today can become obsolete tomorrow. If you want to scale, you need predictable, repeatable services — not custom automation every time. And trying to sell $5K–$10K/month automation to businesses that barely understand AI is a tough game to

This is the part nobody talks about. We see the same thing in manufacturing. The model is maybe 10% of the value. The other 90% is sitting down with the owner and mapping out exactly how they handle quotes, follow ups, and weird edge cases. You can't skip that with a better model.

@Jampzey I set up AI agents for small business owners using it. One salon owner went from 3 hours a day on Instagram DMs to zero. The useful part wasn't the model. It was the 90 minutes writing the rules for how it should behave.

Start with the stuff your team complains about most. Seriously. We walk clients through their week and ask "what makes you want to pull your hair out?" That's usually data entry, quote follow ups, or scheduling. Pick the one that eats the most hours per week and automate that first. The chatbot can wait.

@MahlumAI @SamJakAI dude this is so true. we built something similar for HVAC leads and the boring data entry stuff was way more valuable than the chatbot part. how do you even figure out what to automate first when everything seems manual?

As a cloud solutions architect, I'm intrigued by the potential of AI agents to transform small business operations, with many of my clients already exploring chatbot implementations to enhance customer service, can AI-driven automation increase productivity? (re: x.com/nigeriantribun…)