About
The Craft of AI
Plain talk on AI for the people who run things — built on one stubborn idea: look at the work first. The AI part is easy.
The idea
Most AI fails for an unglamorous reason: it gets bolted onto work nobody ever understood. AI scales whatever it finds — so point it at a mess and you don't get efficiency. You get a faster, more expensive mess.
The companies that win do the opposite. They understand how the work actually happens before they automate any of it. Understand first. Automate last. That's the whole craft — and it's the part almost everyone skips in the rush to add AI.
Where it comes from
This isn't a take that showed up with ChatGPT. The deep-research practice behind it — geniant, going back to Project 202 in 2003 — has spent more than twenty years watching how businesses really work before changing anything: design research, observing the actual work, asking why a hundred times.
Understanding a business isn't something you buy or prompt your way to. It comes from people who've struggled with how the work actually gets done. The AI is new. The discipline isn't.
About Grant
Grant Baldwin is the founder of geniant, a research-and-design practice that helps operating leaders see their own businesses clearly enough to know where AI actually belongs. The Craft of AI is where he shares what he's seeing in the field — the field guides, the Brief, and the failures worth learning from.
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