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From automating operational bottlenecks to building entirely new products in days, founders and business leaders across industries are discovering how AI is accelerating their biggest wins.
AI and the tools it powers have quickly become essential components for many businesses, particularly those that stand to gain from automating repetitive tasks so they can free up time for more human-oriented work. Several business leaders and founders have discovered just how useful AI can be, even across seemingly unconnected industries or use cases.
Starting With the Problem, Not the Tech
Although AI clearly has its benefits, those benefits often come from its careful application and mindful understanding of when and when not to use it. Helping businesses recognize this issue is one of Quantum Lane’s main goals.
Selda Seyfi, the company’s founder, built the consultancy around one principle: start with the business problem, not the technology. Her firm guides clients away from what she calls “shiny object syndrome” so they can pursue solutions that don’t merely use AI for its own sake.
“You’ve got to stop trying to automate the mess,” Seyfi explains, pointing out why AI use needs to be intentional. “I was working in a large agency a few weeks ago, and the process they do for finance reconciliation is a complete mess. They do these 70 steps that are really convoluted… and make no sense whatsoever to anyone doing them.”
Seyfi’s approach has helped clients avoid costly mistakes, such as automating flawed finance workflows that needed reworking downstream. Quantum Lane maps root causes first, then determines whether AI, simple automation, or existing software is the right fit.
“The thing that they think they need is usually the answer to a symptom they’re seeing in the business, rather than resolving the root cause of why that symptom exists in the first place.”
In identifying where a business’s problems are actually coming from, Quantum Lane is better able to prescribe solutions that will make a difference without creating more problems in the long run. As Seyfi puts it, “We start with the problem, we don’t start with the technology, ever. Because it might not need AI, it might just be a simple automation, or it might be a piece of software that already exists somewhere that you just don’t know about.”
An AI Co-Founder for Every Entrepreneur
For some business owners, the hardest part of running their operations isn’t building their products, but instead knowing how to run their business after launch. There are many questions that need to be answered when starting a company, but when founders don’t know what those questions are, they have few ways of making steady progress.
This problem is central to Base.ai’s business model, which is why its co-founder and CEO Caroline Hazlehurst has developed tools designed to help business owners answer questions they didn’t know they had.
“Once you build your product, how do you actually build a business? How do you get your first customer? How do you make your first hires? How do you run finance?” she asks, recognizing that many business owners lack answers to those questions before starting their business.
In practice, Base.ai serves as an AI “commercial co-founder,” integrating all business data into a single command bar that gives founders context-aware guidance on marketing, finance, legal, and more. The platform begins with a simple URL input, after which Base.ai scans publicly available information, identifies the founder’s goals, and builds what it calls a “company brain” that becomes more precise the more tools are connected to it.
“Every piece of information, every piece of data about your company is pulled in,” explains Hazlehurst. “And it then makes your business queryable over time. So it’s just easier to run your business from the early days.”
Hazlehurst sees Base.ai as a leveler, removing operational barriers that once required expensive teams to overcome, so anyone with a great idea can build a great business.
“As a founder, you can just focus on the customer, and you can focus on the product, which is the most important thing. Base just allows you to be AI native from day one; all your data is organized, your operations toolkit is set up.”
Building in Days, Not Months
Eran Thomson, founder of PowerProv, saw how much time and money his team was losing to outdated systems and started experimenting with AI. He saw results soon thereafter. A slow, insecure website was replaced with a new AI-built site in a few days, earning an “A” performance rating. According to Thomson, a custom CRM now automates outreach to 150 leads daily.
“I was really impressed with how I was able to build a site that loads fast, gets an A rating on every measurement tool, and I can constantly iterate features just by basically having a conversation with Claude,” he explains, highlighting the process’s simplicity and effectiveness.
Thomson also built a social app called “Smile,” which is designed to foster real-world connection among nearby users. Using AI, he was able to do so in just four days for minimal cost, bypassing a previous $90,000 MVP estimate.
Describing the process, he stated that “I started going down the rabbit hole on Tuesday. By Friday, I had an app in TestFlight. To get from idea to functional app in four days and be testing it in the real world with people is just remarkable.”
For a company rooted in human communication and connection, the takeaway is fitting: AI is making it possible to do more of what makes us human.
“If I wanted to do it before,” he admits, “I wouldn’t have been able to; it would have taken me days to figure out how, or I would have paid someone to do it. We would have gone back and forth, I wouldn’t have liked it. And it took me 10 minutes.”
Helping Humans Handle the Heart
Rica Elysee, founder and CEO of BeautyLynk, has a clear philosophy: let machines handle logistics, and let humans handle empathy. Her platform, which connects on-location beauty professionals with clients across roughly 180 markets, uses AI to manage the complex logistics of scheduling and coordination while keeping all client-facing communication warm and human.
“The things that we can give to AI are logistical,” says Elysee, pointing out where the AI ends and where people start. “‘What time should the break be? How many pros should we program for this many services that take this much time?’ When you think about math, AI can jump in.”
“If you’re not thinking about math,” she adds, “AI should not be part of the conversation.”
This philosophy emerged from the nature of beauty work itself. Professionals often serve as de facto confidants for their clients, absorbing personal disclosures that require care AI is incapable of providing. For Elysee, AI expands capacity without replacing compassion.
“We can’t put an AI to communicate with the bride about her process or her skin. That needs to happen with a human touch. She needs to know that someone is there that cares and is empathetic about this one day that is going to be a huge part of her memories.”
As AI lowers the barrier to launching businesses, Elysee sees both opportunity and challenge: ideas are now easier than ever to replicate. What matters most, she argues, is tenacity and a network no algorithm can copy.
“AI has transformed the conversation of what it means to be VC-backed. Today, you don’t need venture. What you need is grit and processes and a legitimate idea that you can own. Not something that can be copied, because everybody can copy each other off of AI today.”
Supporting Strategic Co-Piloting
Turning ideas into products is a uniquely challenging problem, one Dan Haiem, founder of App Makers USA, has spent 12 years helping entrepreneurs solve.
During that time, he has watched AI alter the economics of development. Features that once required million-dollar budgets are now accessible to early-stage startups, and timelines that stretched over years have compressed substantially.
Haiem reflects on how “things that used to be like, ‘God, that will cost you a million dollars, we’re going to have to train a model and hope it works.’ Now it’s like, ‘oh yeah, just plug in OpenAI or whatever,’ and it’ll do the trick.”
App Makers USA operates as a strategic co-pilot for clients, steering them away from common pitfalls like competing head-on with well-funded incumbents. The company earned its credibility by enduring hardship, most notably a painful experience Haiem had with an offshore developer.
“Small mistakes you make can end up costing you like a hundred grand for nothing,” he shares. “Building completely the wrong thing or misunderstanding a competitor. Giving them that partnership; it’s sometimes such simple advice, but it could really save people a lot of time, a lot of money.”
The founders who succeed, Haiem says, share a common trait: they are obsessed with the problem they are solving. AI can accelerate everything else, but passion and market understanding remain irreplaceable.
“If the founder is on fire, and they’re really going to give this their all, and they’re approaching it in the right way, that’s someone we want to work with long term. We love building something interesting, something cool, something that might change the world.”
Using AI to Solve Real Problems
AI has a reputation for being volatile because many businesses pursue it for its own sake rather than doing so with a specific goal in mind. Businesses that are winning with AI, meanwhile, appear to be doing so because they use it to solve real problems.
Even if it’s used for something as straightforward as compressing timelines or lowering costs, AI used with a clear problem in mind will almost always be more valuable than AI used to solve problems only perceived to be present.
