The newsletter and the person behind it.

The newsletter

Switchboard is a weekly newsletter about what happens when real businesses — the kind with loading docks, inventory rooms, and regulars who've been coming in for decades — start running on AI.

It's written by someone doing it, not covering it.

Every issue has three parts: The Lead (one deep story, ~800 words), The Workbench (one thing you can do today, ~300 words), and The Wire (3–5 links that actually matter to someone running a business, ~200 words). Lands in your inbox on Thursdays.

Who it's for

Small business owners with 5–100 employees who are AI-curious but not AI-native. You run a retail shop, a manufacturing operation, a professional services firm, a restaurant, a trades business. You know AI is changing things but feel like the conversation isn't for you.

Switchboard makes it for you.

Who writes it

Kyle. I run Columbia Fur & Leather in Duluth, MN — a 120-year-old menswear and heritage goods store. We moved to Canal Park last year. The store has been here longer than most of the buildings around it.

Two years ago I started rebuilding the business on an AI-native stack. Agent-written product copy. Automated content pipelines. AI-orchestrated operations. The same week my agent system wrote 40 product descriptions, I was hand-dyeing indigo on the shop floor. That tension is what this newsletter lives in.

I'm not an AI researcher. I'm not a startup founder. I'm a guy with payroll to make and a 120-year reputation to protect, figuring out what AI actually does — and doesn't do — for businesses like mine.

That's the perspective I write from. Every week.

What Switchboard is not

It's not a top-10 tools list. It's not deep-tech analysis written for engineers. It's not hype, and it's not doom. There are plenty of newsletters covering what OpenAI announced this week. Switchboard is about what it means if you have 12 employees and a 30-year reputation and a growing suspicion that this matters.