I sat down with Devin Kearns, co-founder & CEO of Custom AI Studio, to break down what it actually takes to build an AI agency with real enterprise value, not just another lifestyle business. We get into why most AI work being sold today won't survive 2027, why the mid-market is the prime opportunity (not SMBs or enterprises), the 11 ways AI experts are actually making money right now, how to position with frameworks instead of being just another vendor, and the five things Devin wishes he knew sooner. If you're building, running, or thinking about starting an AI agency, this is the strategic conversation I wish I'd had two years ago.

So I'm sure you guys have heard the term "AI slop", and everyone sorta defines it differently. Maybe you think it's those TikToks of AI-generated fruits going on dates. Maybe it's infographics with misspelled words. Maybe it's something else entirely. But I want to talk about it in the context of communication. Internal, external, content you put out into the world. I write my LinkedIn posts with AI. My agent knows my business, how I write, how I speak. That's just how I work now. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think everyone should be using AI to write if it makes them more efficient. But this isn't a binary yes or no. It's a spectrum. Sometimes AI can draft and send automatically. Most of the time, I want it to just draft. Then I review. If someone sends me an email with em dashes everywhere, I don't actually care at all that they used AI. The fact that I can clearly tell it's AI-generated isn't the problem. What I do start asking is: → Did they proofread this? → Is this completely accurate? And subconsciously, I might start losing trust. Not just in the email but in the person who sent it. Our job here has changed from writer to reviewer. This quote has really stuck with me: "You can outsource your thinking, but you can never outsource your understanding." When your name is attached to the content, you take credit if it lands, as you should. But that also means you need to take accountability if it's incorrect. Taste and reviewing are becoming more important than ever. AI is super intelligent and powerful, but I don't want to see a world where we trust AI so much, that we stop reviewing things, and then the human on the other end of the content starts losing trust in us. That's why even though I write with AI, and people know that, I still try my best to disguise it and make it sound as "Nate" as possible. Check out the LinkedIn post I just wrote about this HERE

My accountant probably thinks I've lost it. The bet I'm making: rebuild my food businesses around an AI OS instead of selling AI services to clients. Every question I used to send to my accountant, finance team, or ops manager -the kind that ends with "let me pull the report"- should get answered by the system instantly. Reporting, ops checks, accounting queries - all pushed into agents. It's bigger than just n8n flows. I'm even swapping the camera system and the visitor-counting setup so the data actually feeds the OS cleanly. Saw @Nate Herk drop the AIOS course right as I'm in the middle of this. Pretty good timing. Anyone else here building agents for their own business instead of for clients? Curious who else is going this way.

Just dropped a new course in the classroom and I'm pretty pumped about this one. It's the full step-by-step on building your own AI OS. Same exact setup I use every day to run the YouTube channel, the community, and my team. 8 lessons, all my templates and prompts, plus a free GitHub repo so you can skip the boring setup and just start building. To unlock it in the classroom, you just need to hit level 3 in the community. Honestly pretty easy: - Drop an intro post if you haven't yet - Engage with a few other members in the threads - Help somebody out who's stuck on something That's pretty much it. Get to level 3 and the whole thing opens up. See you in there. - Nate

Prompt caching is the reason Claude Code can save you 300M+ tokens a week without you doing anything. In this video I break down the 80/20: what caching actually costs, the small habits that protect your session limits, and the few things that quietly reset the cache. The free token dashboard and session handoff skill are in my school community. TOKEN DASHBOARD REPO