Free guide for founders & product teams

The AI Integration Playbook

How to turn AI from a risky expense into a real product advantage. A four-stage framework for picking what to build, where, and when — without burning cash.

The AI Integration Playbook — a 4-stage framework for product teamsGet the free playbook

Live with us

Wed 29 April · 12:00 BST

Online · Free · Recording sent to all registrants

Andreas and Mike walk through the full playbook live at the Barclays Eagle Labs webinar — with Q&A.

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The four-stage framework

The same framework SmplCo uses with founders and innovation teams. Built from 125+ products shipped and refined every week. Recognised by Figma as a global exemplar of AI-assisted development.

Stage 01

The right strategy for your stage

Pre-seed, seed, Series A, scale-up, enterprise — each has a different AI playbook. Most failures are people copying the wrong stage.

Stage 02

Where AI actually creates value

The 80/20 of where AI pays back. A practical filter to score any feature for AI fit, and the patterns to avoid.

Stage 03

Governance, guardrails, scalability

The bit founders skip until something embarrassing happens in production. Lightweight evals, observability, and cost ceilings.

Stage 04

AI as an asset, not a budget drain

Caching, smaller models, batch and async patterns, in-house vs API, and the metrics that actually tell you whether your AI is earning its keep.

The mistakes we see every week

Six predictable patterns that turn an AI investment into a budget drain. The playbook covers how to spot and avoid each one.

Bolting AI onto the wrong feature

Adding a chat interface because a competitor did, instead of starting with the place AI actually moves a metric.

Using a Series-B model for a pre-seed problem

Paying for a frontier model when a small fine-tuned one would do — and burning runway on inference.

No evals, no observability

Shipping AI features with no way to tell when they degrade or how much they cost per request. Then panicking.

Confusing AI usage with AI value

Measuring tokens consumed instead of business outcomes. The result is a budget drain that looks like progress.

Waiting for the perfect moment

Watching the market move while your team debates infrastructure. Six months of focus is the most expensive thing you can spend.

Going all-in on one model

Treating one provider as a permanent partner. The right answer is usually a thin abstraction and the freedom to swap.

Get the free AI Playbook

6 pages. No fluff. The same framework Andreas and Mike use with the founders and product teams they work with every day.

The four-stage framework, applied stage by stage
A practical filter for scoring features for AI fit
The cost levers that turn AI into a real moat, not a line item

Get the free playbook

6 pages of frameworks for integrating AI into your product without burning cash or stalling execution.

Need a second opinion on your AI bet?

Book a free 30-minute call with Andreas and Mike. No pitch — just a sanity check on what you're building, where the cost is going, and whether the AI part is doing the work it's meant to.

Say hello

Andreas & Mike

Co-founders, SmplCo

hello@smpl.as