The Vision Didn't Change. The Technology Finally Caught Up.

Here's something most people don't know about AI.

It isn't new. Not really.

When I was at IBM in the early days of my career, we were already playing with neural networks, the same foundational technology that powers today's AI tools. We could see what it might eventually do. The problem was the compute power required to do anything meaningful with it. Unless you were a major enterprise with a budget to match, it simply wasn't accessible. The technology was real. The timing wasn't.

I ran into the same wall with CRM.

At IBM, I led a marketing department where we applied the early CRM principles pioneered by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in their "One-to-One Marketing" work, before the term even existed. IBM eventually decided to build a CRM product: a behavioral analysis tool that could forecast consumer purchasing behavior based on data patterns. I led the effort. We built it. We sold it. And then IBM decided to exit the application business, because the compute power required was simply too expensive for most companies to justify.

I was still a believer. More than that, I was convinced that the businesses who needed this technology most were the ones being priced out of it. Not the Fortune 500 companies. The smaller ones. The ones running on instinct and spreadsheets when they could have been running on data.

So I left IBM and started ThriveCRM.

That version didn't make it. The technology still wasn't there, and startups are hard even when the timing is right. I eventually converted it into a marketing database services business. Programmers, clients, real work. And ran that for years. Then life intervened, as it sometimes does, and I stepped away from entrepreneurship and into a long chapter of consulting: business analysis, project management, and a lot of time spent inside organizations figuring out where they were losing time, money, and momentum.

That diagnostic work became its own kind of education.

Three years ago, or maybe more honestly thirty years ago, I found AI again. This time was different. The technology had finally caught up. What once required a server room and an enterprise budget now runs on a laptop. The capability that IBM was selling to Fortune 500 companies in the '90s is now accessible to a business with twenty employees and a real problem to solve.

I threw myself into it. And when I came up for air, I realized something: everything I'd spent thirty years learning was exactly the foundation this moment required. How businesses actually work. Where they break down. How to talk to both the people running the business and the people building the technology.

ThriveCRM came back. This time, the timing is right.