AI for Common Folks: the literacy work behind the consultancy

Alongside the client work, we run a free newsletter that has nothing to do with consulting. It’s called AI for Common Folks, and it exists for one reason. Most people are getting their AI news from headlines that never actually explain anything.

A model “passes the bar exam.” A company “achieves AGI.” None of it tells a teacher, a small-business owner, or a college student what any of it means for them. So we started writing the explanations ourselves. The rule is simple. Explain AI the way you’d explain it to a smart friend over coffee. No PhD required.

What it is

It’s a free newsletter, published on Substack, with more than 23 episodes in the archive. Right now our active series is AI Explained: plain breakdowns of the concepts everyone keeps hearing about. What a token is. What RAG means. Why an agent is different from a chatbot.

The archive also holds two earlier series. AI Daily Digest summarized the most important AI news of the day, and The AI Shift looked at what AI is doing to work and life. We may come back to them. For now the writing goes into AI Explained.

The line we keep coming back to is “stay smart, stay human.” We’re not trying to turn readers into engineers. We’re trying to make sure regular people can make their own decisions about a technology that’s going to touch every part of their lives.

Why we write it

Fair question for a consulting team. The honest answer is that the literacy work and the client work feed each other.

Explaining RAG to a reader with no technical background makes us sharper at explaining it to a client’s leadership team who have to sign off on a project. The skill is identical. Strip out the jargon, find the real-world example, tell the truth about the limits.

It also keeps us honest about who AI is for. It’s easy in this industry to talk only to other engineers and forget that the person whose job is changing usually isn’t in the room. Writing for common folks puts that person back in the room every day.

And it’s the clearest evidence of how we work. Everything we publish is something we’ll stand behind. We’re honest about what AI can’t do, and we don’t sell hype. That’s the same posture we bring to a discovery call.

Where this is going

AI for Common Folks stays free. That isn’t changing. AI Explained is where the writing goes right now, and there’s a long list of concepts still worth breaking down.

If you want AI explained in plain English, subscribe to the newsletter. It’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime.