LLMs decay without your data. Generic models lose relevance fast. Your business has unique patterns, customer language, and operational knowledge that generic AI can't replicate. That's your competitive advantage.
- Customer conversations. Support chats, emails, call notes. This is pure gold for understanding your customer's exact language, pain points, and how they describe your solutions.
- Internal documents. Meeting notes, project docs, decision records. These capture your tribal knowledge, how things actually get done, and the nuances of your business that live in people's heads.
- Operational data. Simple spreadsheets tracking your workflows, sales processes, or customer journeys. Not the fancy analytics, just the raw stuff that shows where things slow down or succeed.
- Public-facing content. Website copy, product descriptions, social posts. This shows how you communicate your value in your own voice, which trains AI to represent you authentically.
The 50/500/5000 rule: 50 conversations reveal patterns. 500 documents build context. 5000 data points create a self-reinforcing system where insights feed better data, which creates better insights.
Reply YES if you want the checklist to map your existing data assets into a practical, no-ML-required AI foundation. No hype. Just what works.
This piece is from our notes on helping SMBs (10-100 people) build their first in-house AI teams. If your team is exploring this — quick feedback and questions welcome in the comments.
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