No philosophy.
Just the how
You run a business. You don't need a lecture on the future of work, you need to know what we'd actually build and whether it'd help. So here it is, no fluff. Read the situations below and see how many sound like a Tuesday.
Your spreadsheet quietly became a database
It started as a quick spreadsheet. Now half the business runs on it, and everyone's a little afraid to touch it.
You've outgrown a spreadsheet when:
- It holds more words than numbers: notes, statuses, descriptions, not just sums.
- More than one person edits it, and nobody's sure who changed what.
- The same information is copied into two or three other places.
Our How
That's a database wearing a spreadsheet costume. We build you the real thing. AI does most of the building now, so it costs a fraction of what custom software used to.
No more “don't touch the master.” No more version 7 final FINAL. One source of truth your whole team can actually trust.
Your data lives everywhere except one place
The CRM, the inbox, the accounting tool, two spreadsheets, and someone's memory. None of them quite agree.
You'll know it's you when:
- You check three places to answer one simple question.
- “Where's the latest version?” is a daily sentence.
- Pulling a basic report eats half an afternoon.
Our How
You don't need another tool. You need the ones you already pay for to share a single source of truth. We connect them and consolidate.
One place to look. The afternoon back. Decisions made on what's true, not on what someone remembered to update.
The same job, every week, by hand
There's a task someone does every week that the whole team quietly dreads. It's not hard. It's just relentless.
It's an automation, not a job, when:
- It's rules-based: if this, then that, no real judgement call.
- It runs on a schedule: every Monday, every invoice, every new lead.
- When that person is on leave, it simply doesn't get done.
Our How
We hand the relentless part to AI and leave the judgement to your people.
When a task can be fully automated, it was never human work. It was a person being asked to act like a computer. We give the computing back to the computer, and the week back to your team.
Everything routes through one person
There's someone who has to touch every job for it to move. When they're flat out, everything queues. When they're on leave, everything stops.
You've got a bottleneck when:
- The same person approves, forwards, or kicks off nearly every task.
- Work sits waiting, not because it's hard, but because one inbox hasn't got to it.
- Nobody else can step in, because the how lives only in their head.
Our How
That's not a staffing problem, it's a flow problem. We map what funnels through them, automate the routing and the rules-based approvals, and write down the rest so the work keeps moving without a single point of failure.
The business stops holding its breath every time one person takes a day off. They get to lead, instead of being the valve everything has to squeeze through.
The same question, a different answer every time
Ask three of your team the same question and you get three answers. Your customers ask the same handful of things over and over, sometimes not even in English.
You need a knowledge agent when:
- New starters take months to learn what really lives in everyone's heads.
- Customers ask the same questions every day, and each one is answered by hand.
- The right answer exists. It's just buried in a doc, an inbox, or one person's memory.
Our How
We build a retrieval agent grounded in your own material: your docs, your policies, your past answers. Point it inward and your staff get one consistent answer. Point it outward and it handles customer questions around the clock, in whatever language they ask.
One source of truth, answering instantly, the same way every time. Your team stops repeating themselves and gets back to the conversations that actually need a human.
You've already met one
Say hello to Mia
Mia, in the corner of this page, is exactly that last scenario: a customer-service agent grounded in 158 Lab's own knowledge. Ask her something, in any language, and you're looking at the kind of thing we'd build for you.
Chat with MiaNone of these quite you?
That's usually the sign it's time for a conversation, not a template. Tell us where the friction is and we'll tell you, honestly, whether AI is the answer or whether you just need a better process.