Beyond the Prompt: Why AI-Built Workflows Fail (And What My HARDEN™ Method Taught Me About Making Them Work)
If you’re in my line of work, you’ve seen the hype. Every day, there’s a new video or a new post claiming, “AI can build your workflows now!” You see these demos where someone gives a tool like ChatGPT a single prompt, such as “Create a Make.com flow for content generation”, “Build me a Zapier […]
How We Transformed a 30+ Table Recruiting System From Excel Spreadsheet Pain to Airtable Intelligence [Real Case Study]
Every business that grows eventually discovers the same painful truth: Excel and Google Sheets don’t scale. They’re incredible tools for ideas, MVPs, and early operations. But once your business becomes real (especially once you have multiple teams, dozens of workflows, hundreds or thousands of data points, and information flowing across departments), spreadsheets stop being helpful […]
Why Enthusiasm Isn’t Enough: Sales Psychology and the Role of KPIs in Automation
“Rosti, great lecture. This is exactly what we need in the company!“ M.’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm as he described how he wanted to transform his logistics company. He had watched the free lectures on automation and artificial intelligence by co-founder Rostislav Karashki. Two meetings.Six hours of intensive discussions.Eighteen automations, carefully divided into four […]
When and Why to Migrate Your CRM from Google Sheets vs Airtable CRM: A Practical Case Study
Every business starts somewhere. Very often, the first customer database lives in a simple Google Sheets file. Using Google Sheets as a CRM is like “riding a bicycle” for the first time. It is cheap, easy to handle, and perfect for a start. (I still remember: when I launched my first agency in 2018, I […]
What is “PDD” and Why It’s Critical When Building Automations?
Imagine you want to build a house. Before you start laying bricks, you create a plan. Detailed blueprints. Specifications. Measurements. Without this plan? The house might collapse. Or worse – you’ll build something completely different from what you envisioned. In the world of automation, this plan is referred to as a PDD, or Process Design […]
When AI Agents Cost More Than They’re Worth: A Lesson from a Real Project
🎯 The Challenge Today’s article comes directly from my practice – from a project that made me fundamentally rethink how I approach automation with artificial intelligence. And no, this isn’t about a technical failure. This is about a crucial insight: sometimes the best solution is NOT to use AI. Let me tell you about a […]
Months of Unpaid Work and One Lesson That Changed Everything: How the HARDEN Method™ Was Born
My first major automation project was the moment I realized how critically important it is to define the project scope correctly from the very beginning. The client wanted “an automation for classifying tickets.” I thought: “Easy job, I’ll finish it in a week or two.” But after two days of work, I realized that: The […]
The HARDEN Method RACI Matrix: Who Does What, When
The HARDEN Method RACI Matrix in action – Why the biggest automation failures aren’t technical—they’re organizational
The $50K Lesson Every Automation Team Learns the Hard Way
Picture this: Your AI automation is working perfectly in demos.
The models are accurate, the integrations are solid, and everyone’s excited about the potential savings.
Six months later, it’s collecting digital dust while your team has quietly returned to manual processes.
What went wrong?
Nine times out of ten, it wasn’t the technology.
It was the people—specifically, unclear ownership of who decides what, when things go wrong, and who’s accountable for the outcome.
When AI automations move from demos to day-to-day operations, the single biggest failure mode isn’t “bad models”—it’s unclear ownership.
How We Transformed Customer Support for a 30-Year-Old Freight Company Using the HARDEN Method
Our first real-world success story: turning ticket chaos into automated efficiency
The Challenge That Every Growing Company Faces
Picture this: You’re running a successful freight forwarding business. Thirty years in the market, solid reputation, growing customer base. But there’s a problem that’s eating away at your team’s productivity.
Every day, hundreds of customer support tickets flood your Zendesk. Your agents spend hours just figuring out where each ticket should go. A booking confirmation gets mixed up with an urgent shipping issue. Documentation requests sit in the wrong queue for hours. Your customers wait longer than they should, and your team feels overwhelmed.
Sound familiar?
This was exactly the situation our client faced when they reached out to us. And it became the perfect testing ground for our newly developed HARDEN Method for Automations.
But let’s dig deeper into what this really looked like before we stepped in.
The HARDEN Method™: A Complete Guide to Reliable AI Automation
The HARDEN Method is a practical, end-to-end framework for building AI automations that actually work in production—not just in demos.
The HARDEN Method sequence—Discover → Design → Build → Break → Harden → Launch → Monitor—combines product ownership, engineering discipline, and QA rigor so your workflows deliver measurable outcomes: fewer manual steps, cleaner data, and predictable operations.
You’ll learn how to select the right pilot, design for failure and rollback, implement guardrails (including idempotency, retries, and observability), and demonstrate ROI with KPIs that matter to your operators.
If it can’t survive the Break phase, it doesn’t ship.