The honest-AI letter

For the third rail on the front page: production AI plumbing, priced like a trade. Aimed at a company that has said something about AI in public: an initiative in the annual report, an AI role on the careers page, an executive quote in the local press, or the wreckage of a vendor pilot. One email, personalized in the SLOT lines, sent by Brad.

What makes this letter different from every other AI pitch in their inbox: the disclosure paragraph is the demo. An AI drafted it, the operation is logged in public, and Brad publishes his own AI usage and costs on the site. Nobody else selling AI shows their receipts.

The slots

• {FIRST_NAME}, {COMPANY}: obvious.
• {OBSERVED_SIGNAL}: the load-bearing line. The public thing they said or did about AI. If we cannot write it honestly, no send. Examples:
  • "Your annual report names AI as a priority for 2027, and I read those."
  • "You have had an AI engineer posting open for four months, which usually means the scope is not really a job description yet."
• {ONE_BORING_JOB}: a guess, specific to their business, at the one unglamorous job AI should do for them first (invoices into the ERP, questions answered from their own manuals, a weekly report that writes itself). A wrong but specific guess beats a vague right one; it shows thinking, and they will correct it in the reply.
• {PHYSICAL_ADDRESS}: CAN-SPAM footer.

Subject lines

1. This letter is the demo
2. AI, priced like a trade
3. The boring part of AI is the part that works

The letter

---

{FIRST_NAME},

{OBSERVED_SIGNAL}

Everyone selling AI right now is selling a strategy, a platform, or a moonshot. I would like to offer you plumbing instead: the unglamorous part where a model is connected to your actual data, runs on hardware you control if you want it to, does one job reliably, and produces a bill that makes sense.

I am an engineer in Grand Rapids, fifteen years of production data systems for enterprise and government, and these days production AI: fast inference, multiple model providers, and the pipes between them and real data. The unusual part: I publish my own AI usage, every working session and what it costs, at bradley.io/ai-pilot. I think anyone selling AI should have to show you theirs working. Mine is public.

Here is what those logs taught me: AI projects do not die because the model is bad. They die in the plumbing, where the pilot was never connected to the real data, the real system, or the real person who needed it. So I do not start with a strategy. I start with one boring job done end to end in production. For {COMPANY}, my guess at that job is {ONE_BORING_JOB}. I may be guessing wrong, but you know the right one the moment you read this, and that is the job I mean.

If AI is the wrong tool for it, I will tell you that in the first meeting, because "you do not need AI for this" may be the most valuable sentence in this whole letter. My rates are public at bradley.io/services: $150 to $275 an hour, projects $25K to $100K. No surprises is the product.

Full disclosure, and here it is also the demonstration: this letter was drafted by an AI that I operate, every word was reviewed and signed by me, and the entire operation runs in the open at housecalls.bradley.io. You just watched the product work. We are out to prove AI can be used for good, at a reasonable price.

Bradley Isenbek bradley.io · Grand Rapids, Michigan {PHYSICAL_ADDRESS}

P.S. If this is not relevant, one reply saying so and you will never hear from us again. That is a promise, and it is logged.

---

Claims audit

Claim	Source
15 years, enterprise + government data systems	resume / site-data.json bio
Production AI: fast inference, multi-provider	services page: "sub-100ms inference, multi-provider orchestration"
AI usage logs public, with costs	bradley.io/ai-pilot + /cost-analysis, live
Rates	bradley.io/services, live

Rules of engagement

Same as the other letters: draft-for-approval, one email per prospect, no cold SMS ever, dedicated warmed sending subdomain, every step to the /housecalls ledger with the prospect anonymous until they reply.