Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

Creating your own app? Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.

App creation and experimentation by non-technical users had been slowly growing. AI-assisted coding and deployment allowed deep domain experts the freedom to explore and create. You just talk to AI and it makes and publishes the app, who needs devs?

Is it really that easy?

The 80% problem

Reading through support forums reveals a pattern - user creates and publishes the app, then runs into an odd problem that AI agent cannot solve (or in some cases, makes worse).

Because they lack the technical background, the helpful suggestions posted by others are not really helpful and the whole experience goes sour quick.

But that’s not the worst that can happen. A non-technical user who shared their experience building and publishing the app found himself hacked, with API key stolen and credits for AI usage calls used up. The situation was caused by a significant security holes created by code generator and security keys exposed in plain text.

And while you can ask the agent to correct the issues, you need to know what they may be to even notice the problem and ask the right questions.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

Of course, even technology companies have issues with their software full of bugs and security holes. But they are well equipped to manage the fallout, handle risk and have the remediation know-how.

Experiment, find and test out use cases - but before releasing your code into the wild, find a technology expert to advise you. Better yet, have a sidekick with some level of technical background to help you with best practices.

After all, you wouldn’t be changing electrical panel by yourself after watching a single video.

Don’t lose your progress

A good example of software construction rule is to save the incremental changes to your app in the repository - so when AI agent goes rogue and wipes out the code that was working - or a new model gets released and decides to change everything, you can still go back.

Costs will increase

Since you have to pay for AI usage, it’s important to be realistic about your costs. Getting to 80% may cost relatively little, but as your app grows, the cost will increase exponentially with size and complexity.

Be realistic about longevity

“No worries about 80% issue, I’ll just hire someone to fix the last 20%”.

Realistically when a human engineer look at your AI generated code, edits would be required. A typical reasons may be overcomplicating the code logic which makes maintenance expensive, security gaps and badly performing algorithms. In some cases it may be easier to rewire entire sections from scratch.

So treat your app development as a real-life working prototype or you will be disappointed when taking it to finish takes longer than planned.

How to wrangle data

It’s a given that any organization regardless of size or industry would have terrible data. It accumulates in the dusty corners of your daily operations and while everybody knows that something needs to be done to make it useful, it just feels like an impossible task.

And AI pressure does not make it easier.

Here are three practical steps you can take this month:

Standardize your terminology

If your company is over few years old, I guarantee there is at least one piece of data with two different labels. You develop internal slang or perhaps things were named historically and that name no longer makes any sense. Having consistent labeling worth the effort:

• You will help new hires to understand what they are working with faster

• You will make it easier for analytics

• You can find duplicated and outdated data

Build a clean pipeline

It may not be always possible to fix “bad data” - legacy software, complicated processes that nobody wants to touch, things outside of your control like vendor feeds.

Instead of trying to “fix” the data at the source, create a brand new “clean” data feed from your existing sources, preparing it for the modern needs.

Data Classification

If you don’t classify your data, start small. Even basic three category classification significantly simplifies data governance activities.

At very least, define these categories:

• Source of truth (most authoritative version)

• Security level (public, internal, confidential, restricted)

• Retention requirements

Running an e-commerce business? Pay attention to new image capabilities.

I remember the days of automating the product photo editing: removing backgrounds, cleaning up lighting.

Then came AI models. Adding multiple product photos allowed to swipe backgrounds and scenes - it took multiple steps but was so much quicker.

And now the recently released OpenAI model can do this in one shot.

The affordability of these automations unlock new possibilities for your product media. Generating uniquely customized scenes, seasonal variants and running A/B tests on imagery will continue to get easier. A truly innovative ideas may finally be implemented on scale.

Start planning an experiment to test how different visuals may affect the customer’s response.

Watching: WordPress turbulence continues

Automattic, the commercial arm of WordPress and major contributor to open source project had announced 16% layoffs among the legal battle with WPEngine.

Why it matters: the instability of last year trouble in WordPress community shows no signs of settling down. As we suggested before, it would be prudent to investigate alternative solutions as part of business continuation process.

This month we asked:

What came first - Investing in Tech or SMB Growth?

We dig though Salesforce SMB trends report to answer this question

The SMB Tech Mindset: How Strategic Technology Adoption Drives Business Growth

Discover why growing SMBs outperform competitors through strategic tech investment. Learn the four-step tech growth flywheel that transforms stagnant businesses into market leaders.

tenthgearconsulting.com/articles/growing-stagnating-smb-technology-pattern

Is innovation just for startups?

We looked at unique advantages small businesses have.

Small Business, Big Impact: Leveraging Tech for Innovation

Discover practical tech innovation strategies to grow your SMB. Learn how to leverage technology for competitive advantage and increased profits.

tenthgearconsulting.com/articles/small-business-tech-innovation

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 Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

While focusing on SEO, don’t ignore AEO

Have you noticed that the nature of finding information online is changing?

You heard the long standing advice - if you want your business to be found by potential customers, concentrate on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ranking it at the top of the search results.

But now instead of googling and then scrolling to click on the high ranking link, your customers are increasingly turning to AI-generated summary snippets, voice search or just asking chatbots. It’s more user-friendly to get the answer directly (or ask AI to generate a complex research report) but this trend dramatically reduces direct traffic from search engines.

And unless you also focus on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), your business may become invisible.

AEO vs SEO

While SEO focuses on achieving a higher rank in search results, the goal of AEO is to have your online presence understood by a new generation of AI-powered search engines - and your content selected as the best and most accurate answer. It’s still about authority and building your brand, so don’t think that SEO is no longer relevant.

But how are the best answers selected?

If you want to get your site linked in the AI summary snippets, you must help the algorithm to understand and rank your content.

Optimizing for AEO

Optimizing for AEO means making things easier for humans and robots.

AI Search Readiness: Future-Proofing Your Business for Answer Engines

Learn how the shift to AI-powered answer engines impacts business visibility, and discover practical steps to ensure your company remains discoverable

tenthgearconsulting.com/articles/business-ai-search-readiness

• Do you answer common questions using language people actually use?

• Are those questions listed in your headings - with concise answers underneath?

• Can humans scan and understand what you are saying quickly - and does that provide a complete answer?

• Do you have a structured data markup on all essential pages so AI can understand your content better?

• Are important people, places and concepts related to your business represented in this structured data?

AI practical use cases: not just for asking questions

It’s always helpful to see the real examples of how people use the tools - not only does it give you ideas to replicate in your own business, it sparks imagination on what else is possible.

What do other businesses use AI for - right now, without complex vendor contracts and with the straightforward monthly fees?

Content Creation and Optimization

Think beyond creating draft blog posts and website content. Consider generating product descriptions, social media content and marketing brochures.

Try generating training materials and SOP or creating automated policy reviews.

Data Analysis

Use AI to extract messy data from PDFs, websites and documents in Excel. Analyze sales and the impact of your marketing efforts, identifying patterns and trends. Review pricing and analyze best areas for cost cutting.

Content Summarization

No time to read all the latest business books on your list? Extract the most important advice as applicable to your specific business situation.

Need to analyze a large volume of documents quickly? Load them to NotebookLM to generate summaries and ask questions.

Customer Service

Optimize writing emails (and manage conflict resolution) by feeding drafts to AI and generating polite and helpful email copy for your customers.

Keep answering the same questions? Outsource basic customer inquiries to the chatbot.

Automation

Create custom automation processes for your business - think employee onboarding and training, inventory management and sales processes.

Software

It was never easier to DIY. Make minor updates to your website - or create a brand new one, just by talking to the AI.

Create custom data feeds between your legacy software - or a quick Proof of Concept app to test-drive your idea.

Have an old app you rely on - but nobody knows what it does? Generate missing documentation for your existing business applications.

Operations

Quickly create financial forecasts and marketing plans. Optimize your pricing. Brainstorm new ideas and sales strategies. Run a competitor analysis and find your unique advantage.

Photo and Video

Improve your product photography, generate images for content, and touch up professional headshots.

Start experimenting today

In past issues we’ve touched the topic of cost-cutting. Using AI effectively can be an additional piece of that budget puzzle - what can you do today to improve your business?

Nobody wants to touch legacy systems - but the help is here.

Businesses that have been around for a while are more likely to run on legacy software - created out of necessity back when SaaS was not a thing, and so heavily tailored to the specifics of the operations, the replacement feels like an impossible task. Especially since the documentation had been lost.

Usually reverse engineering old code logic is a long and expensive task - I worked on the apps that took weeks, if not months, to analyze. But now you can use multiple AI-powered coding agents to generate a high-level summary of the application and expand from there.

It’s not perfect yet - but in my tests the completion curve is significantly accelerated, which helps to bring the costs down.

Re-evaluate your legacy apps - is it time for the upgrade?

Security alert: even brief exposure compromises your data.

The known expression “Internet is forever” had never been so true - you never know when AI comes looking and indexing.

Research from Lasso Security exposed a use case where a private software code collection on GitLab (online code management system commonly used by software developers) was accidentally made public for a very short time - and AI tool Copilot copied and indexed it.

The problem is once AI copies the information, it’s very difficult to completely remove it. Anything your business puts online by mistake, even briefly, is compromised.

Mistakes do happen, so it may be a good time to review your security policy outlining data handling guidelines and preventive measures to prevent accidental exposure.

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 Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

By now you probably heard of DeepSeek that trained an AI model at significantly lower cost that OpenAI (and on a less powerful hardware) that hit similar benchmarks.

Their secret?

They did more with less, becoming another scrappy company that beat a well funded and better known competitor.

This was a real-life reminder that innovation often sparked by limited resources, questioning existing status quo can lead to better decisions and being smaller and more agile is an advantage.

Getting a handle on tech cost increases

Efficiency in IT budgets is the goal for 2025. Per Gartner’s published report, the spending is estimated to grow 14% on software, 23% on data centers and 9% I IT services (with almost 10% average spend increase across all categories due to somewhat reasonable 4% communication services bump).

What’s worse, the growth in IT products and services may not directly translate to ROI - just because AI will be bundled everywhere doesn’t mean your business can magically benefit from it in a reasonably measurable way.

So how do you become scrappy?

Challenge old advice

“You must run your software on Windows OS”

If your situation allows switching to Linux/Unix and other open source alternatives would significantly reduce the cost- from servers (almost 50% less) to databases to desktop computers the savings will add up.

“You must purchase SSL certificate from DigiCert”.

Depending on your business and industry regulations, a domain level validation certificate from LetsEncrypt (cost - 0) could be sufficient.

“Your servers should be hosted on AWS or Azure.”

Your needs may be covered by purchasing VPS from Digital Ocean - at almost half the cost, better CPU price performance and transparent easy to understand costs. Just like with insurance, it pays to shop around.

What other assumptions do you follow?

Cut through marketing hype - ask tough questions

Tech is not magic - but you may think it is by listening to some sales pitches! Be skeptical and informed on how something works on a high level so you can ask tough questions.

“Use AI to solve all customer support calls” may mean ”Your customers will hate you” or “Your company will be more efficient”. How to tell the difference? By knowing what to ask and insist on metrics.

Don’t be afraid to DIY - with some help

Paying 15$ for a subscription here and there makes sense, right?

In the past the idea of bringing anything in-house or DIY was unadvisable - of course you would save more money hosting everything in the cloud and using SaaS providers and if you don’t, terrible things will happen.

But this may be changing. Especially if you have an internal team with appropriate skillset or interest in learning them.

With advent of AI coding tools (Bolt, Windsurf and Lovable Dev are just few examples) it’s possible to create a function-specific app via text prompt that solves your problem faster and at lower cost - and deploy it automatically.

Modern server management tools reduce the time and complexity required to run them.

There is a learning curve for sure - but it may be time to evaluate if building up these skills worth gaining more control over cost and ownership.

Tech Radar - the Operator and AX

The mobile device revolution changed the way we use the internet thanks to the always available portable pocket computer and narrow purpose apps.

We are now looking into another wave of innovation. OpenAI had rolled out the research version of the Operator - a tool that can use the web to complete an unscripted task for you.

What does that mean for your business future? Your next customer may not be human.

Business Model Emerging Risk

Y combinator - a startup incubator with impressive track record of noticing and supporting emerging tech companies - is good at observing trends.

So their call for startups is an excellent trend study - and in 2025 they are betting on vertical AI agents - LLM deeply skilled in a single domain, such as accounting, law, compliance or marketing.

Realistically such specialized services are hard to automate. The knowledge and expertise is just part of the equation - real world is messy, people like to deal with other humans and there are certain legal and ethical implications.

On the other hand, if we imagine such challenges are solved, it will be difficult to justify premium pricing if a similar service is available at fraction of the cost at 24/7 availability.

Could that put your business at risk? Business books are full of examples where companies with significant market advantage failed to recognize the trend and disappeared forever. I would advocate that your strategic 5 year planning should include possible pivots, including leveraging AI and creating previously impossible products and services.

Multiple solutions that I’ve developed over the years would have been much more efficient and quicker with the current technology.

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 Published by Tenth Gear Consulting

Actionable: taking inventory and assessing the risk

Start of the year is a good time to evaluate your tech disaster planning, analyze potential exposure and review contingency plan.

While you can’t foresee all risk, it pays to be defensive. Identify areas where

• your business depends on the platforms and systems you do not control

• the critical data is stored outside of your reach

• your business decisions and operations are driven by restricted technical capabilities

Here are few examples:

Marketing

If social media marketing is part of your lead generation strategy, what would happen to the funnel if the channel disappears?

7 million businesses grappled with this exact question while TikTok ban was discussed.

Hacking and account bans are devastating but well known threats. Losing years of hard work due to political decision is a new and unexpected angle.

If you haven’t already, setting up systems to own your content, be able to present it on your website and own your followers contact list is a prudent task.

Website

Ongoing WordPress leadership discourse threatens the stability of the platform which in turn increases the risk of disruption to business operations.

Consider the impact of broken plugins and installs, lack of critical security updates and patches and reduced speed of feature development - and how it can affect your business continuity.

Having a fully fleshed out “just in case” migration plan is prudent.

Data

Last month Bench, an accounting startup that provided SaaS for small/midsize businesses shut down without any warning. While customers can still download their data, they have until March to do so - but the situation could have been made much worse if download was not readily available during the critical end of year time.

Who has your data? Relying on SaaS may make it feel that backups are the relic from the past, but companies can and do go under or experience catastrophic failures, hacking and data loss.

Do you have a local copy? How old is it? Not all data is valuable - but the exercise to list and categorize your data is.

Vendor lock-in

Having multiple vendors to support your business processes is convenient and cost effective, but perform annual evaluation on how easy would it be for you to leave them and what the cost of transition may be.

Why planning to leave? The reason may be external - unsustainable cost increases, vendor focus shift to enterprise customers, decision to take product or service in a different direction resulting in a loss of an important feature.

The reason may also be internal - as your company grows and changes, previously sufficient solution is now a blocker.

This exercise helps to identify incoming change point after which the balance of convenience and cost tips.

Looking for inspiration for your annual check?

Grab this document to start.

Pulse check: do you have AI usage policy?

Regardless how you feel about AI, it is becoming unavoidable thanks to bundling inside business software.

For example, Google had announced the plans to include Gemini AI in all Google Business and Enterprise plans, noting that “for now” a very small customers will not be affected. The plan comes with mandatory $2 increase.

And of course Microsoft has CoPilot.

While the promise is increased productivity, ensure that risks are evaluated and policy and training is in place.

Here are few suggestions to start:

• Define acceptable AI usage policy in your company - outline specific actions for which AI can be used.

• Create a list of standardized AI generation tools and a process to request additions or replacements

• Be clear on the consequences for not following the policy.

• Design ongoing training for your staff on using AI and how to do so responsibly and securely. Consider rapid changes in the field

Need help to craft initial policy? Grab a sample here.

Emerging Risk: malicious URLs with a dash of AI

The promising business lead may be a trap.

In the past one way to determine if the company is legit was to check their website and social media presence. Suspicious companies were easy to spot - but that’s no longer the case. Age of AI unlocks not just fake auto generated people but companies - with the polished website full of content and daily posts on LinkedIn.

When such company reaches out to you to discuss an attractive business deal and schedules a video call, it doesn’t raise an alarm. Neither is the invite link that requires you to download a video call client for software you never heard of.

Except now a newly installed malicious application can steal private information, putting your entire business at risk.

This threat scenario has been already spotted in the wild by the Cado Security Labs. While the angle is new, the prevention is the same:

• Don’t download software you don’t know - even if for talking to a potential client about one in a million deal of a lifetime. Use well known video clients like Zoom, Teams, Webex instead.

• Never trust links even if they arrive form a known contact - that too is easy to spoof.

   

Expect more social engineering scams to arrive. In the age of AI, nothing is what it seems.

Quick tip: optimizing consulting spend

Before hiring outside domain experts, ask your crew to define the problems.

The people in the trenches doing the work have a better understanding of your business’s bottlenecks - and are uniquely equipped to suggest improvements to processes and functions.

Once the problems are defined, reach out to experts. This way consultants will spend time solving problems instead of discovering what is already known.

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