How to Turn Proprietary Data Into a Real Advantage with Craig Letton

What happens when your biggest customer tells you that you're behind the curve?

Craig Letton, CEO of hyble, returns to the podcast for a second appearance. This time, he's letting us in on what it actually takes to rebuild a product around AI. We start with the year Craig spent trying to bolt AI onto a platform that already worked, which ended with nothing to show for it and a customer telling him the business was behind the curve. Craig then explains why the team that scaled the company was never going to be the team that reinvented it. He's also honest about what it costs to ring-fence work like this and why so many of his competitors will never get the budget to try. We finish on how you can keep an AI product from doing something you'd regret.

Topics covered during this episode include:

Why using AI to improve an existing product can be the wrong approach.

How a year of investment produced nothing, and what finally forced a change.

Why the people who scale a business rarely build the next one.

What changes when your biggest customer helps build the product with you.

How three layers of AI adoption deliver very different levels of impact.

Why Craig turned out to need a people change rather than a technology change.

What user behaviour revealed about demand that nobody had asked for directly.

How proprietary context creates moats that generic AI tools cannot replicate.

Listen now for an honest account of getting it wrong before getting it right!