What I Learned From My Year of AI Abundance After the Algorithm
Dear Reader,
In February 2023, a client called me and said he had used ChatGPT 3.0 to complete in one weekend what would have taken 10 Odettians six months to do. And he did it for $20. With better accuracy.
That was my oh crap moment.
Overnight, our text classification business was displaced. Automated. Over.
In the 60 days that followed, I moved fast. I identified an AI lead. We built an AI prompt academy and trained our project leads. We rolled out AI-powered services and passed the savings directly to our clients. We also did layoffs, something that felt like cutting off a part of myself.
Over the next year, I slumped into what I would lovingly call my Armageddon mindset. Everything felt doomed. Work itself felt temporary. When clients didn’t buy, I thought, of course. They know AI can do this.
This was a huge shift from how I had built Odetta. Before, I operated from abundance. I believed everyone I met could benefit from our services, and they did. That helped us build partnerships with more than 400 tech clients in five years. But now, I couldn’t see a future.
Subconsciously, I believed we were no longer useful. And that belief started shaping what I saw and what showed up. Yes, there was a tech recession. Yes, our clients were impacted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. But I also knew something deeper was at play, both in me and in the company.
It was a year of staring into the belly of the machine and asking: what’s still worth doing?
In November 2024, while navigating some deeper leadership work surfacing through Odetta, I attended a 10-day meditation retreat with Dr. Joe Dispenza. I didn’t go to fix the business. I went because I was lost inside it.
That’s when the real shift happened.
For 10 days, I trained my mind out of scarcity. Every time fear crept in, I called it out. I practiced holding an intention, like new contracts flowing in, and pairing it with the elevated emotions I wanted to feel: joy, pride, purpose.
By the end of the retreat, something fundamental had changed. Not just in theory, but at a cellular level. I left truly believing that Odetta had a role to play in this AI future.
And almost immediately, the evidence showed up. Just enough to help me believe. While I was still on retreat, four new contracts landed in my inbox. Two weeks later, a PE fund began introducing us to their entire portfolio. We started landing large-scale, high-value data projects, cleaning RevOps and contract data in Salesforce and NetSuite for billion-dollar clients, with deployments of 20 to 50 Odettians.
Since then, we’ve had our busiest months ever. We hired new Odettians for the first time since 2022.
Once I stopped operating from fear, I could finally make sense of what was really happening to work. Not just at Odetta, but across the entire landscape.
And through hundreds of conversations, client projects, and internal reinvention, here’s what I’ve come to understand.
4 Things I Now Know About Work in the Age of AI
1. Organize your company around workflows, not jobs:
The traditional job model doesn’t work in an AI-integrated company.
Break your operations down into task-level workflows and sort them into three categories: automation, validation, and strategy. These are the new layers of operational work. Once you see your business this way, you can start building systems that scale with clarity. This is the future of work.
But don’t leave this shift to individuals. Assign a team to identify and redesign high-frequency, rule-based tasks - like triaging emails, routing inbound requests, or responding to repetitive user actions.
At Odetta, we use Scribe to record workflows and tag each step as manual, automatable, or human-simulated. If a task is trigger-based, repetitive, and saving 10 or more hours per week is possible, it’s worth rebuilding. We use tools like Make.com and Airtop to execute.
2. Forced upskilling isn’t a failure. It’s a blessing:
I’d been trying to upskill our team for years, but the market always pulled us back into what was easiest to sell. Then AI came, and the old work disappeared. Suddenly, there was space for new skills. If you give your people tools and trust, most of them will rise. We saw it happen. Within Odetta, as automation replaced routine data labeling, our Odettians transitioned into QA, data analysis, and algorithm development.
3. Workflow ownership is the new outsourcing:
For some clients, like PE-owned portfolio companies, we operate as AI infrastructure — cleaning and structuring data inside their systems to prepare for AI use cases, whether that’s pricing optimization or new product capabilities. They own the workflow. We execute with precision.
But more and more, product and ops teams are asking us to take full ownership. We design the automation, integrate AI, assign human validation, and deliver outcomes.
4. You cannot lead from fear:
This is the big one. Meditation didn’t save my company. But it brought me back to a place where I could lead again.
“AI is coming for us.” “We’re going to get replaced.” “Let’s wait it out.” That energy spreads fast — and it paralyzes decision-making. I tried leading from that place. It stalled everything.
The moment I shifted to belief — not blind optimism, but grounded trust in what we could build — things began to move again. Your team feels your emotional frequency.
I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve spent the last seven years on the front lines of automation, building real systems where humans and machines work together.
And what I know for sure is this:
The future didn’t start when I had the answers. It started when I stopped stalling and started building again. From belief, not fear.
With love,
Katharine
Want to talk about what this means for your team or your workflows? I’m here.
Just hit my inbox. Or share this with someone navigating the same fog.
Use Case: Automating Internal and External Tasks Across Teams
We start by using Scribe to capture the keystrokes and step-by-step actions involved in a given task. Each step is tagged by tool type, whether it’s manual, automatable, or best handled through simulation.
From there, we design a workflow triggered by specific events, such as when an email is received or a request comes in. We then build the automation using tools like Make.com, Airtop, and Zapier, stitching together CRMs, email platforms, internal systems, and more, all tailored to the client’s specific needs.
Odettian Quote
And if you’re wondering what this looks like on the ground, here’s what one courageous Odettian wrote to me. This is why we do what we do:
“These are my two boys, and I am their strong Mama who doesn’t know what giving up means and will keep striving for what I believe in. For now I work at Odetta in secret, but one day I will be doing it freely. Odetta is not just a workplace where you are a worker; you are valued here as a human. Thank you so much to each one of you for being there for me, for understanding my unusual circumstances. Remember me in your prayers. And stay with me as sisters.”
Quote
“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”