So your team has been tirelessly working on the most critical AI transformation project in the company. It’s intense, there’s a lot of pressure, and you’ve hired the best talent you can find. You sit down for your first quarterly check‑in with your CEO and your prepared progress report. It goes something like this:
Lots of data prep, successful deployment of a complex pipeline, some porting issues between the Data Science team’s notebooks and the AI engineering team’s preferred environment, but the model is showing strong progress—maybe some concerns about bias in the data.
What your CEO actually cares about
We’ve discovered a new way of working with the supply‑chain team so they can work XX % faster with the insights the model has provided.
We learned that YY was causing teams to over‑pay for supplies.
If we change this business process, we can save $ZZ and reduce the time it takes to deliver new products.
We have a proposal for something we didn’t think of before that we discovered while iterating outcomes.
Notice how none of this sounds like what was keeping the team up at night in that first quarter? Enter the 90/90 rule: “The first 90 % of the code accounts for the first 90 % of the development time. The remaining 10 % of the code accounts for the other 90 % of the development time.” — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs
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What if you could leap‑frog that first 90 % and focus on the last 10 %—the things your CEO actually wants to talk about? That’s exactly what building blocks like ChatGPT enable.
Why building blocks work
Most business problems—despite differing data types, industries and outcomes—can be broken into repeatable logical components. Packaging those components into reusable building blocks frees your brain to focus on the high‑value final 10 %.
A starter catalog of blocks
AutoML – rapid discovery and iteration with guard‑rails.
Pre‑trained & cloud‑hosted AI services – sentiment, speech‑to‑text, etc.
Model repositories – Hugging Face for open‑source, pre‑trained models.
Declarative AI frameworks – e.g., Uber’s Ludwig, Apple & LinkedIn projects.
Foundational models – ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and friends.
Becoming the 10 %
Assess where the team spends its time, shift effort toward the impactful 10 %, and meet every 4–6 weeks to grow and refine your suite of blocks. You might be surprised how much faster you can operate—and how ready you’ll be for the next CEO check‑in.