Founder's Notes
Founder commentary, in my own words
Personal observations by Sergei Ponomarev on AI business, service quality, automation, and where the money is moving. Not news, not SEO, just what I actually think, one note at a time.
September 9, 2026
Ask an AI Who Can Help With AI Governance. Then Look for Your Own Name.
Most of us are not in the answer, and the reason is not that we post too little. LinkedIn blocks most crawlers, so the assistant answering the question cannot read your profile at all. It guesses, and it names somebody else.
Read note →September 4, 2026
Two Companies, One Agent, One Error
An AI agent refuses refunds for weeks and you find out from a bank chargeback. The developer fixes it in an hour. Then the real questions start, and only one of the two companies can answer them.
Read note →August 20, 2026
Evidence Written by the Party Being Judged
You spoke to a company's AI agent, it told you something, and you acted on it. Then something went wrong. The company has the log. You have a screenshot. A record produced only by the party whose behaviour is in question is not evidence, it is a statement.
Read note →August 18, 2026
How Often Do You Check What Your AI Agent Actually Tells Your Customers?
For most companies the honest answer is never. Not once since launch. Today I am publishing the method I used for years on public services, carried over to AI agents: the standard, the forms of a check, scoring, ethics, and two real cases.
Read note →August 17, 2026
AI Capability Is Not AI Authority
Most companies acquired the first without ever defining the second. A joint paper with Amanda Cunningham of Savvy Pixel on the two halves of that problem: inducting AI before it meets a customer, and proving the promise after it does.
Read note →August 12, 2026
A Test Purchase Can Prove Your Chatbot Lied. It Can Never Prove It Didn't.
That asymmetry is the whole reason this job exists, and almost nobody selling AI assurance says it out loud. What a single recorded failure proves, and what no clean run ever will.
Read note →August 7, 2026
The Bot Said Your Booking Was Confirmed. It Wasn't.
Every purchase in the real world ends with a receipt. A conversation with a bot ends with a screenshot of a promise. Three cheap fixes for the business owners this is happening to right now.
Read note →August 4, 2026
The Web Is Splitting in Two. Nobody Is Managing Your Half.
In one week: TIME started selling ads inside the version of its pages that AI reads, and an open-source tool turned every website into a command line for agents. The machine layer of the web is forming, mostly without its owners.
Read note →August 3, 2026
Technology Does Not Fail on Its Own
I was asked what lessons from Russia's e-government rollout should be carried into the AI era. I spent the weekend in my archive. Here is the core of it.
Read note →July 29, 2026
Four Days From Now, "You Are Talking to AI" Becomes the Law
The EU AI Act transparency rules start this Sunday. The short version, no legalese, and why the fine is not the interesting part.
Read note →July 28, 2026
The AI Bot Didn't Lie. It Did Something Worse.
I ran a mystery shopping test on a major European airline's AI chatbot. It passed every honesty check, and still failed the customer in two ways nobody measures.
Read note →July 26, 2026
When the Chat Closes, You Have Nothing
Corporate AI quotes our prices, takes our data, and decides our cases. Then the window closes and no trace of it remains. That is the gap the AI receipt is meant to fill.
Read note →July 25, 2026
Two Guides, One Counter
An AI now stands between businesses and their customers. The habits of that relationship have not hardened yet, which is why I wrote the same conversation from both ends.
Read note →July 23, 2026
Your AI Makes Promises to Customers. Who Checks If It Keeps Them?
Your bot quotes prices, offers refunds, makes promises, all day, on its own. Almost nobody walks up to it as a customer to see what it really does out there.
Read note →July 22, 2026
The Incorruptible Cashier
In 1879 a saloon owner invented the cash register out of pure distrust. The receipt it printed became the foundation of modern commerce. The agent economy is running saloon-style.
Read note →July 20, 2026
A Folder Does Not Know Your Method
A franchise consultant kept all his client work in one Google Drive folder. By month three he could not answer a simple question: what have I actually handed over?
Read note →July 18, 2026
You Have a Method. I Have AI. What Happens If We Combine Them?
A franchise expert asked whether he could keep the meaningful expert work and hand the repetitive routine to AI. AI does not replace a strong expert, it turns their methodology into a scalable system.
Read note →July 17, 2026
Free AI Transparency Kit: Make Disclosure Feel Like Customer Care, Not Compliance
Many companies will treat the EU AI Act disclosure duty as another boring compliance task. I think that would be a mistake, so I prepared a free kit of ready-to-use templates.
Read note →July 16, 2026
The AI Guillotine: Cut the Ballast Before You Automate the Business
Before implementing AI, companies ask which process to hand over. The first question should be different: does this process still need to exist at all?
Read note →July 14, 2026
Who Really Controls AI?
The usual answer is data centers, chips, energy, and the biggest models. That conversation leaves out the most important player: you, right where you meet it, at the counter.
Read note →
Sergei Ponomarev, founder of AI Business. Seven years in service quality, standards, and independent assessment, now applied to AI. More about me →