Twelve years at Salesforce. Then I ran a cookie business.
That last part is the one that matters.
That last part is the one that matters.
THE WORK OS IN PRACTICE
After Salesforce, I built a food tech business from scratch. The French Cookie Guys sold French cookies at farmers markets and corporate gifting accounts across the Bay Area.
A mini ERP in plain language managed production schedules and restocking in our commercial kitchen. The newsletter ran 50+ editions: my voice, my editorial calendar, semi-automated publishing. Image generation handled the Shopify storefront; product shots that saved me $5,000.
I never thought of it as “using AI.” The system ran the logistics, the publishing, the storefront. I focused on the product and the customers. That was the Work OS in practice, before it had a name or a course built around it.
Most AI teaching shows you what to use. The rebuild (how your work actually flows) is the gap AI Practitioner Circle was built to close.
WHERE I STAND
AI won’t cost you your job. A consultant, analyst, or researcher at your firm who rebooted how they work before you did becomes relatively more valuable. That’s the actual competitive pressure, and it’s already running.
The advantage lives in the system you build on top of the tools. Take two analysts with identical subscriptions. One builds persistent context, reusable automations, workflows that compound. The other opens a chat window when they remember. The gap opens within weeks.
Building AI into actual workflows creates fluency. Most professionals spend 90% of their time reading about it instead. Many organizations give the whole team unlimited access and watch the work barely change. The constraint was never the subscription.
Real change takes months. The consultants building real advantage started deliberately, one workflow at a time, with real client work. The ones who rushed have demos.
AN UNFILTERED READ ON AI
The practical consequence: I can say what I actually think about AI without it costing me a job, a partnership, or a relationship with a vendor. Most AI commentary gets filtered through one of those pressures. Mine doesn’t.
What you won’t find from me: tool reviews, prompt libraries, weekly AI hacks, manufactured urgency about AI ending your career.
What I do share: my honest read on what’s working and what’s hype, my beliefs about how AI actually transforms professional work, and who this is genuinely built for. I think a lot about AI at work: how it gets applied, what the transformation actually requires, where most approaches fall short. Whether you enroll in REBOOT or not, that’s what I write about.
If a tool earns its place in how I run AI Practitioner Circle, I’ll say so. If it doesn’t, I won’t recommend it.
If you want to understand what REBOOT teaches, the course page is the right place to start. If you’d rather think longer first, the Substack is where I work through these ideas, without a sales sequence behind it.
Fabrice Talbot
Founder, AI Practitioner Circle