This is how Storyminers uses AI, on this site and in client work: the tools named with their jobs, what never touches client material, and where judgment stays human. It starts with this website. Mike tells the story of its making just below — and nothing you’re reading went live without his decision.
Four case images are AI-generated and say so where they appear, and every number traces to the Sources page.
You’re reading a website made with AI. I want you to know what that actually meant, because actual human work went into every line of it — and because the story might be useful to you.
I started out daunted. My aims have never been bigger, and I’ve never felt more capable in my life than I do right now. That’s exactly why I was afraid: afraid I’d do a disservice to my readers, afraid I’d disappoint myself. I’m not a programmer. My programming résumé is one Fortran class with punched cards and a BASIC project called Armchair Psychologist that answered everything you typed with the next question. Are you sure? How long have you felt that way? Tell me more. I passed.
What I did have was an archive. Around 2000, when I worked at IBM, somebody told me AI or something like it was coming, and that I should save everything. I believed them. And I did. Years of projects, writings, and thinking, which turned out to be the hard part, because you can’t just throw a bunch of information into a bucket and expect AI to sort it for you. It can sort by word, by count, by date. Meaning is another matter. Turning years of work into something AI could make sense of took real time, and it was mine to do.
The breakthrough came when I stopped asking AI to produce things and started asking it to teach me what I was about to do, and then to interview me.
The first interviews were technical. What would you like here? How big should this be? What should that say? I couldn’t answer them. I couldn’t fathom the breadth of my own ideas at that level of detail. So together we changed the subject: interview me about experiences, something I know a lot about. About how people would feel. About what the business would become as the tools unfolded. Some of those interviews were the most stimulating conversations I’ve ever been part of. When we designed the cockpit for our platform, I didn’t specify screens. I talked about flying — about instruments that show the state of things the way an attitude indicator shows a pilot the horizon, and about operating less with hands and more with intent.
My language got to evolve. I name the same thing different ways on different days, so we built a tool that tracks my working vocabulary (we call it Lexicon) and correlates the names later. I got to speak at my own speed.
Every decision was captured in my exact words. When we ruled on a name, a sentence, or a service, my words went into the record and came back later as proof points. A tool I could use in client work that thinks like a designer, built while I was building the website — that was the goal.
Coherence: a designer should see how one decision touches the decisions already made. When I changed our free first conversation offer from thirty minutes to sixty, that one sentence rippled across a dozen pages, the offer language, and the live booking calendar.
And the words had to sound like me. About a hundred conversations in, we cracked the rules for catching AI-sounding language. Clarke Bishop, an AI architect and a colleague of more than twenty years, sent me his tool for it. We mined my own hundred conversations of feedback for the corrections I asked for most, merged the two, and now first drafts land much closer to my voice. There’s still craft in it. Introducing big ideas to people hearing them for the first time is still more art than science. The final stretch ran on the newest Claude model of the moment, and it caught many, many discrepancies in names and references.
We made these rules for one small firm. On 23 September 2026, the scientists and company heads who briefed the UN Security Council on AI asked for the same habits at world scale, testing before release, transparency, and someone accountable; Gary Marcus’s summary of the session and the UN’s own record are on the Sources page.
To give it, I had to step into the shoes of the people this site is for: clients, prospects, partners. I never figured out how to hand that to AI, and I don’t know if I ever will. I think it deserves to remain a human responsibility, because human relationships are, by definition and by my preference, not mechanical. However sophisticated the writing tools got, I could still check the logic left to right and top to bottom, and spot the phrases that would raise an eyebrow.
The panels helped most. We convened review panels of thinking styles — people whose minds I know well, people I admire, and, on purpose, some people I don’t like. We say we value diversity of thinking; the panels were where I proved it to myself. Each reviewer told me where they leaned in, where they got skeptical, and where they shut down. It’s rare that a writer gets that much honest feedback that fast. At first the volume was overwhelming. Then I realized it was helping me, and the results came faster and faster.
And the substance was mine alone: what this company stands for, what I want the experience of working with us to be, and where it goes from here. That was all me.
I take responsibility for every single word on this site.
Honestly: five to ten times longer than any communications project I ever scoped as a digital agency co-owner. The money cost was a rounding error next to an agency build. At the agency we’d give a piece two or three passes before it went to a customer. This site has been through more than three hundred working conversations, and the record shows 328 revisions in the final six weeks alone.
The things you say to yourself gain value as time goes on. What I said five, ten, and twenty years ago has been valuable to me precisely because I can see the direction of my own evolution in it. And knowing your thoughts won’t be lost changes how you think: more aware, and on the good days, more confident.
The pause paid twice. Building this website built many of the tools we’ll need for The Forge, our platform — the record of decisions, the working vocabulary, the panels, the coherence checks all carry straight over. My honest guess is that it saved months and months of effort. The site is what you can see. The working company underneath it, with digital twins I can adjust the day something needs to change, is what actually got built.
Most of all, I understand now what AI can do, and how I work best with it. Learning to adapt the tools to yourself, and your habits to what the tools can do, is work nobody can do for you — and I believe it’s exactly what each of us needs as leaders now. It’s how you move forward. It’s how you get back to leading with calm certainty and confidence.
I started this project daunted and full of fear. I was suffering from AI. Now I’ve never felt more capable. This site is just the first thing you’ll see from me.
However you feel about AI — at the societal level, the political level, the operational level — I encourage you to dig in, because it’s not going away. Organize your thoughts. Save your ideas. Around 2000, somebody told me to save everything, and I believed them. It turned out to be some of the best advice I ever got. So let me be your somebody: start saving your work today. Say your thinking out loud. When the tools are ready, you’ll be ready.
Research before we meet, transcription while we talk, analysis of engagement material after. Three things hold in every engagement:
Client material is used only inside your engagement. Never to train AI models.
Recording stops when you say so. Notes may continue by hand.
Judgment stays human. So do taste and the ability to reframe. AI gets us more passes at the thinking; what we recommend is ours to defend. The harness that keeps it so, from our written worldview to the points where a person has to say yes before anything goes out, is part of the work.
We’ll tell you exactly which tools touch your material, and where. Questions are welcome — ask Mike.
We name our tools the same way we name our sources. Today the list looks like this:
We test new AI tools all the time. Client information never goes into one unless we hold a paid account with it. When the toolset changes, this list changes with it. Reviewed August 2026.
A working conversation about the future you’re trying to create — and what’s keeping it from moving.
No prep. No deck. No pitch.
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