Crankset teaches non-technical leaders to build real AI systems for their actual work — executive briefings, research workflows, customer analysis — in hours, not months. No code. No IT team. No prior experience.
No technical background required · No new tools required · No engineering team required
Every week, a new AI tool launches. Teams sign up, experiment for a few days, and move on. Leaders approve budgets, attend webinars, and ask their technical teams to "look into it." Six months later, very little has changed.
The problem is not tool availability. Nearly everyone already has access to powerful AI.
The problem is that most leaders still don't know how to take a real business problem, open the right tool, and turn it into a working system that saves time, improves decisions, or creates revenue leverage.
That skill is now one of the highest-leverage executive capabilities in business. It's also teachable.
The leaders who learn this skill will compound leverage every week. The ones who don't will keep paying for tools no one uses, falling further behind competitors who figured this out, and watching the gap between awareness and capability grow wider.
Most AI investments fail to produce meaningful returns because companies buy tools without building internal capability. The tool is rarely the real constraint. The skill gap is. — McKinsey, 2024
Nearly half of business leaders say they don't know where to start with AI. Not because AI is inaccessible — because no one showed them how to apply it to real work. — Thryv, 2024
Most AI deployments underdeliver because leaders delegate AI to IT, approve spend, and hope value shows up later. It usually doesn't. — Harvard / BCG, 2024
The fastest path to AI value is not another strategy deck. It's teaching leaders to build a few practical systems themselves — quickly, visibly, and in the flow of real work. — Crankset perspective
There are two kinds of leaders right now.
AI Tourists have tried ChatGPT, watched demos, forwarded articles, and approved AI budgets.
AI Builders can take a business problem, open the right tools, and build a working solution in hours.
Crankset exists to help leaders make that transition. Not through generic training. Not through slide-heavy seminars. Through hands-on building, using your real workflows, so you leave with systems that are already creating value — and the skill to build the next one yourself.
Answer 10 quick questions about how you work today. Get a personalized report that shows your AI Builder Score, the three highest-leverage builds for your role, and what to start on this week.
Built by Ammon Curtis — 20+ years leading product orgs that scaled past $100M ARR, $625M+ in enterprise value across three exits. Now he teaches leaders to build with AI.
A hands-on process that turns non-technical leaders into confident AI builders — with real systems running inside the business, not just notes in a folder.
Before: "I don't know where AI fits."
After: "I know exactly where to build."
We start with what actually matters: how AI works, where it breaks, what it's good at, what it's bad at, and where it creates real leverage in a business like yours. You'll learn how to evaluate an AI use case quickly, avoid common traps, and separate gimmicks from genuinely useful applications.
Before: "I've never built anything."
After: "I built 3 working systems today."
This is the center of the experience. You'll build real AI systems for your actual work: your custom voice and style guide, your daily executive briefing, and a specialized AI expert for your most critical workflow. Not demos. Not sandboxes. Systems built around how you actually operate — and you'll learn how to build the next one yourself.
Before: "I do everything manually."
After: "My systems multiply my effort daily."
Once you know how to build, you stop seeing AI as a vague strategic initiative and start seeing it as an operating capability. We help you identify what to build next, how to train your team, where to standardize, and how to create an internal AI rhythm that compounds over time. Same effort. Multiplied output.
This is not a lecture. It's a build environment.
Every participant builds real AI systems designed around their actual work. Here's what's on the build menu.
An AI trained on how you write and communicate — your tone, vocabulary, sentence structure, level of formality. Once built, it drafts emails, memos, Slack messages, and talking points that sound like you wrote them. Not generic AI output. Your voice, replicated.
An AI that synthesizes your calendar, priorities, and key context into a structured briefing delivered before your first meeting. You stop spending the first 30–60 minutes of your day piecing together what matters.
Analyzes P&L data, builds forecasts, summarizes financial reports, flags anomalies.
Turns rough notes into structured deck outlines, talking points, and narrative flow.
Drafts proposals, pitches, client comms, and internal announcements in your voice.
Takes an agenda and attendee list, returns context, talking points, risks, and questions.
Tracks competitor moves, pricing changes, and news — delivers a structured brief on demand.
Analyzes customer feedback, churn patterns, and upsell signals from your data.
Writes job descriptions, screens resumes, prepares interview questions, summarizes candidates.
Takes a research question, pulls sources, synthesizes findings into a structured brief.
Turns verbal descriptions and rough notes into clean SOPs, playbooks, and workflow docs.
An AI grounded in your own documents, decks, writing, and thinking — answers questions, supports prep, and makes your prior work reusable at scale.
Two ways in. Both are hands-on. Both leave you with working systems and the skill to build more. The First Build Session gets you started. The Intensive transforms how you work.
The fastest way to go from "I should do something with AI" to "I built something with AI today." Four hours, hands-on, no slides after the first 20 minutes. You'll build your custom voice and style guide, your daily executive briefing, and learn the method behind both — so you can keep building on your own.
Best for: Leaders who want fast, tangible momentum and a practical starting point.
You'll leave with three working AI systems — your custom voice and style guide, your daily executive briefing, and a specialized AI expert built for your most critical workflow. More importantly, you'll know exactly how to build the next one yourself. If all three aren't built and running before you walk out, we keep working with you until they are.
Join the Waitlist →The complete experience. Two days of hands-on building designed to move you from AI awareness to real, durable capability. You'll build your full AI operating system — daily briefings, communications in your voice, a custom AI expert for your most critical workflow, and more. You'll leave with systems running and the skill to build whatever comes next.
Best for: Leaders who want meaningful behavior change, durable capability, and real operating leverage.
You'll walk away with 5+ working AI systems built around your actual work, the skill to build whatever comes next on your own, a "build next" roadmap prioritized by impact, and 90 days of support from the Crankset team to keep you building. This isn't a workshop you forget by Monday. It's a capability shift.
Apply for the Intensive →Looking for a private session or a corporate onsite for your team? Let's talk →
Infusionsoft: $17M → $108M. InfoArmor: $20M → $100M+. Two companies, two industries, same growth inflection. The pattern recognition behind Crankset's methodology.
Led product, marketing, and design at InfoArmor — driving a 5X increase in company value. The ML-powered platform delivered identity protection for the Federal Reserve, Bank of America, and 100+ Fortune 500 companies, plus cybersecurity and threat intelligence for Amazon, Starbucks, and more. Acquired by Allstate.
From building Infusionsoft's first marketplace and developer ecosystem to leading ML-powered products to running a 25-person product org today. Not a recent convert to technology — a career built in it.
Launched a new product to 3M+ existing users while acquiring 300K+ new users — in under 12 weeks. Crankset brings this same bias for speed and execution to every engagement.
Now I teach other leaders what took me 20 years to learn: how to build things that create real business value.
Everyone's an AI expert now. Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you'll find a hundred people who've read the same articles, attended the same webinars, and have the same opinions about what AI means for business.
Almost none of them have built anything.
I spent 20 years in the room where decisions get made — leading product organizations at two companies that scaled past $100M in revenue, helping create over $625M in enterprise value across three exits. I've sat across from boards, rebuilt teams after 40% attrition, and led through an acquisition. I know what it's like to own outcomes, not just have opinions about them.
Then I discovered something that changed everything: I could build real software — apps, agents, automated workflows — using nothing but natural language. No engineering background. No code. The same thinking I'd applied to product strategy for two decades suddenly had a direct output.
That's the shift I teach. Not AI theory. Not trend commentary. The actual skill of building AI systems that do real work — taught by someone who builds them every day and has spent a career leading inside the businesses where they need to run.
Most AI educators have never led anything. Most business leaders can't build anything. I do both. That's why Crankset exists.
Operator first. Builder always. Teacher by instinct.
I speak to executive teams, leadership groups, and business audiences about what AI changes, what it doesn't, and what leaders need to do now to build real capability inside their organizations.
Whether it's a keynote, fireside chat, or workshop — the goal is the same: help leaders stop guessing about AI and start building with it.
The gap between AI awareness and AI capability is widening every week. The goal is not to become technical. The goal is to become dangerous with the tools that now shape speed, decision quality, and leverage across the business.
Crankset exists to close that gap — quickly, practically, and in a way that changes how you work.
No code. No jargon. No endless strategy deck. Just real systems, built around your real work.
Answer 10 quick questions. Get a personalized report that shows where you are on the Tourist-to-Builder spectrum — and the three highest-leverage AI builds for your specific role.
Enter your details to get your personalized AI roadmap with prioritized opportunities and action steps.
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