Brandon Harris

Weaponizing AI to battle the work you're avoiding

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

There are days in business where it genuinely feels like you’re in the pit of despair.

I’ve had plenty of them.

You can be working hard, making the right decisions, and still have moments where it feels like nothing is working.

One thing I’ve learned building Stride:

Don’t make permanent conclusions from a temporary low.

There were stretches where I couldn’t see exactly how things were going to work out.

Then one conversation happened, one opportunity showed up, one small win created enough runway to keep going, and that next step led to another one.

You don’t need perfect confidence every day.

You need enough conviction to keep moving when the path isn’t obvious yet.

Momentum rarely feels dramatic while you’re inside of it.

Most of the time, it just looks like refusing to stop on the days you really want to.

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@serialsales I got you

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@Abdollahoffline 100%

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

Contrary to popular belief... most companies do not need more AI.

They need their business to stop fighting itself.

That distinction is basically why Stride Systems exists.

A modern company might have:

A CRM.
Slack.
Email.
A customer portal.
Order data.
Sales reps.
Support tools.
Automations.

A dozen SaaS products someone added because they solved one specific problem at the time.

Individually, all of them work. But together?

Nobody knows what the hell is going on.

A customer asks where their order is.

Someone checks the CRM.

Then the portal.

Then an email thread.

Then messages somebody in operations.

Then promises to call the customer back.

That isn't a people problem.

It's a SYSTEMS problem.

And adding another chatbot on top of it doesn't solve anything.

What we build at Stride is the connective tissue.

We take the information a business already has... the conversations, workflows, customer data, operating procedures, decisions, and institutional knowledge then we make it usable across the company.

The goal isn't “AI everywhere.”

The goal is that the business starts behaving like one system.

A sales rep shouldn't have to remember every follow-up.

An operator shouldn't have to hunt through five tools to answer a simple question.

A founder shouldn't be the API connecting every department together.

And an AI agent shouldn't be given unlimited control on day one and told to figure it out.

It should learn how the business operates.

Learn what good looks like.

Earn autonomy.

Then take more work off the team's plate as it proves it can be trusted.

That’s the part of AI I think matters.

Not replacing humans because a model technically can.

Removing all of the stupid, fragmented work humans never should have been doing in the first place.

Stride Systems is important to me because we're not trying to bolt AI onto businesses.

We're trying to make businesses actually work like the technology finally allows them to.

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

I think a lot of businesses are using AI backwards.

The dominant conversation right now is about autonomy: how many tasks can we hand off, how many agents can we deploy, and how much of the business can AI run without a human involved.

I think that skips a step.

The better question is: how much context can we give AI before we ask it to make decisions on our behalf?

Because an agent with poor context doesn’t create leverage. It just makes mistakes faster.

We’ve all seen the version of this that looks incredible in a demo. The agent sends emails, updates the CRM, follows up with leads, creates content, analyzes calls, and handles operational work. For the first couple of weeks it feels like magic.

Then the business changes.

Pricing gets updated. A process shifts. Someone makes an exception. Two systems disagree. The AI is still operating on an older version of reality, and suddenly the thing that was supposed to remove work has created a new layer of supervision.

That’s why I think the less exciting side of AI is going to matter a lot more than people expect.

The real advantage may come from having better documentation, cleaner data, fresher context, clearer sources of truth, and a much stronger definition of what “good” actually looks like inside the business.

Then you add autonomy.

We’ve started thinking about this as earned autonomy. An AI system probably shouldn’t have unlimited freedom on day one.

It should make recommendations, ask for approval, and prove that it understands the business. As it consistently gets those decisions right, you gradually remove the human from the loop until people are only involved in the unusual cases.

That may not sound as exciting as saying AI runs your company.

But I suspect the businesses that win with AI won’t be the ones with the most agents.

They’ll be the ones whose agents understand the business best.

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@Abdollahoffline nailed it

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@serialsales See I spent a lot of time thinking about what the hold up was for you to really get your hands dirty with AI.

But I think you guard your business and time insanely well. So you took the leap when there was enough evidence AI would be effective. And look at you now.

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@digitalcrash0ut Damn

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@digitalcrash0ut Well… I mean what’s he yelling about is it worth it?

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@serialsales @bot Hahaha this is actually gold

[Dylan @serialsales]

When ur resident AI genius wins the monthly TSSC wins challenge @Stridesystemsai

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@serialsales These have been in my skull since they arrived. ❤️❤️

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@Sureffi Gonna try it tmrw. Ghostty on new mac m5max

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@digitalcrash0ut But just different enough 😂

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@heypetar Oh!

I mean if that’s the filter you use to determine if something is good. “Was it vibe coded?” Fails on its own.

I respect the candor.

So vibe coded = Petar hates it?

Or do you investigate?

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@heypetar Isn’t it all now? Haha

But yes. I’m not sure what you’re hunting for with this question though.

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@heypetar @cap

[Brandon Harris @Stridesystemsai]

@heypetar Cap is what I use

But I’ve seen dozens man