Journal 009
AI Readiness Started as an Internal Tool
We weren't trying to build another product. We were trying to understand how AI would understand Wayli.
When we first started thinking about a project called AI Readiness, it wasn't because we wanted to launch another product.
We wanted to understand how AI would see Wayli.
Like many new websites, we were asking familiar questions.
Would AI understand what Wayli does?
Would it know which pages mattered?
Would it explain the platform accurately?
Could it confidently use and share what Wayli had to offer?
At first, the answers were disappointing.
We hadn't given AI enough understanding to work with.
What changed
As we explored the problem, something unexpected happened.
The questions we were asking about Wayli turned out to be questions any organisation could ask about its own website.
- What evidence can AI find?
- What does it confidently understand?
- Where are the gaps?
- How trustworthy are its conclusions?
Almost without noticing, we had started designing a way to analyse any website, not just Wayli.
The question was no longer simply whether AI understood us.
It became whether we could build a repeatable way for any organisation to see what AI could find, understand and trust.
AI Readiness wasn't born from a product roadmap.
It emerged from trying to solve our own problem.
Why it mattered
That discovery changed the direction of the platform.
Wayli Labs began as somewhere to record what we were building and learning.
It soon became part of the research process itself.
Every experiment improved Wayli.
Every improvement to Wayli helped shape AI Readiness.
The platform became its own first case study.
If we could understand why AI struggled to explain Wayli, the same approach might help other organisations understand how AI sees them too.
That was the point when an internal tool started becoming a product.
What I learned
Useful products do not always begin with a market opportunity.
Sometimes they begin with a problem you are already trying to solve for yourself.
When the solution becomes repeatable, it may be useful to other people too.
Spark
Inspired by:
- Internal sprint review