"AutoDS was bootstrapped and eventually reached 1.8 million users, generated more than $1 billion in user revenue, and exited successfully to Fiverr. From its earliest days, the company was fast moving, the kind of place where speed was strategic and rapid implementation felt like the natural way to operate. But as Pozin's team moved from pilots to production, they learned that speed alone was not enough. AI only delivers results when the right data foundations and ownership structures are in place."
""Without the right governance, data organization, and access, AI can't scale," Pozin tells Fast Company. "Once we built that foundation, everything changed. AI stopped being a feature and became part of how we operate." That experience was not unique to AutoDS. In 2025, across several industries, companies quickly realized that deploying AI at scale required confronting uncomfortable truths about their infrastructure, their assumptions about what AI could do, and their willingness to solve unglamorous problems before chasing transformative ones."
An operational epiphany showed that rapid AI feature deployment fails without proper infrastructure. AutoDS grew quickly but found pilots did not translate to production until data governance, organization, and ownership were established. Once foundational systems were built, AI moved from a feature to an operational capability. Across industries in 2025, companies confronted infrastructure limitations, unrealistic assumptions about AI, and the need to tackle unglamorous engineering work before pursuing transformation. The industry shifted from prioritizing bigger models and more capital to focusing on practical systems that sustain AI beyond demos and pilots.
Read at Fast Company
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