You Can’t Sail Today’s Boat on Yesterday’s Wind: The Blueprint for an AI-Native America
By Michael Noel
For decades, I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses, pushing them to digitize workflows, adopt new technology, and embrace the growth that follows. And in all that time, one truth has become clearer than ever: the old models are broken.
Businesses have been built in silos. A transportation company worries about trucks. An energy company worries about power. A tech company worries about code. They are all sailing their own boats, often into the same storm, wondering why it’s so hard to make progress.
Today’s world—a world of AI, of unpredictable supply chains, of immense challenges and even greater opportunities—demands a new kind of boat. It demands a vessel built from the ground up to be intelligent, self-sufficient, and resilient.
So, we decided to build one.
We’ve assembled an alliance of five distinct organizations, each a master of its craft, to create something new: a living, breathing ecosystem that isn’t just using AI, but is AI-Native from its very DNA. This isn’t a partnership; it’s a blueprint for the future of American industry.
Let’s meet the crew.
The Players: Assembling a Dream Team
Imagine building a company not with departments, but with dedicated, best-in-class partners. That’s what we’ve done.
- The Muscle & The Senses: Kurb Kars
- What it is: The kinetic force of the alliance. Kurb Kars runs the fleet of rugged, advanced vehicles, from Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) to autonomous off-road logistics.
- Its Role: Kurb Kars is the primary point of contact with the physical world. Its vehicles are more than transport; they are mobile data-gathering platforms, equipped with sensors that see, map, and learn from every mile they travel. They are the hands, feet, and eyes of our operation.
- The Proving Ground: Digital Adventures Outdoors R Us (DAOS R Us)
- What it is: An adventure tourism company operating in the beautiful but unforgiving terrain of rural Arizona.
- Its Role: The real world isn’t a cleanroom. It’s messy, unpredictable, and the ultimate test of any new technology. DAOS R Us provides the living laboratory—the rough roads, the remote campsites, the real logistical challenges, and the actual human end-users—that turns theory into proven reality. They are our first, toughest, and most important customer.
- The Power Plant: Agra Dot Energy
- What it is: A sustainable energy innovator.
- Its Role: What’s the biggest vulnerability for any modern enterprise? The grid. Agra Dot Energy makes our ecosystem immune to this by turning local agricultural waste into a reliable source of clean energy (biofuels and electricity). It powers the Kurb Kars fleet and the DAOS R Us campuses, creating a closed-loop system that is both sustainable and completely self-sufficient. It’s the heart that pumps lifeblood through the entire system.
- The Architect & The Funding Engine: Dereticular
- What it is: A strategic grant writing and business development firm.
- Its Role: Vision without resources is just a dream. Dereticular’s role is to translate the alliance’s groundbreaking work into compelling narratives that unlock non-dilutive funding from federal agencies like the DoD, DOT, and DOE. It’s the storyteller that ensures our engine has the fuel to grow.
- The Brain & The Nervous System: Biz Builder Mike
- What it is: My own consultancy, focused on one thing: building AI-Native companies.
- Its Role: This is the intelligence layer that connects everyone. We design the digital workflows and implement the “Data Flywheel.” Every piece of data from Kurb Kars’ sensors, every passenger schedule from DAOS R Us, and every kilowatt from Agra Dot Energy is captured, processed, and used to make the entire system smarter. We ensure the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.
The Magic: The Data Flywheel in Action
This is where the alliance becomes more than just a partnership. It becomes a learning organism.
- Kurb Kars operates in the real-world DAOS R Us environment, powered by Agra Dot Energy.
- Every trip generates data—terabytes of it. Road conditions, vehicle performance, energy consumption, passenger feedback.
- Biz Builder Mike’s systems capture this data and feed it into our core AI models.
- The AI learns and gets smarter. It finds a more efficient route. It predicts a vehicle will need maintenance before it breaks down. It optimizes energy production based on the next day’s transportation schedule.
- The smarter AI makes the service offered by Kurb Kars safer, cheaper, and more reliable.
- This superior service allows us to win more contracts and expand operations.
- More operations generate more data, which makes the AI even smarter.
The flywheel spins faster and faster. Our operational scale becomes a technological advantage, and our technological advantage drives our operational scale. This is the definition of an AI-Native company.
Navigating the Headwinds: Overcoming the Pitfalls
A vision this ambitious isn’t without its challenges. But we’ve built the team specifically to overcome them.
- The Pitfall of Complexity: How do you manage five separate companies without getting bogged down in bureaucracy?
- The Solution: You don’t. Biz Builder Mike’s entire purpose is to digitize and unify the workflows. We are building a single, shared “digital nervous system” that gives every partner real-time visibility and automates the handoffs between them. We manage the data, not the meetings.
- The Pitfall of Regulation: Autonomous vehicles, new energy sources, and AI are all regulatory minefields.
- The Solution: This is where Dereticular shines. Our deep expertise in navigating federal agencies isn’t just for securing grants; it’s for building partnerships. We don’t see regulators as obstacles; we see them as stakeholders. By working with them from day one, we help shape the rules for the industries of tomorrow.
- The Pitfall of “Black Swan” Events: What happens when there’s another pandemic, a major grid failure, or a fuel crisis?
- The Solution: The alliance is fundamentally anti-fragile. Our reliance on locally-sourced energy from Agra Dot Energy makes us immune to global fuel shocks. Our autonomous logistics from Kurb Kars can operate 24/7, even when human drivers can’t. Our entire model is designed to get stronger when the world gets more chaotic.
The Destination: More Than a Company, An Operating System
This alliance is building more than just a successful business. We are building a replicable blueprint—an AI-powered Operating System for Rural Infrastructure.
The ultimate product is the intelligent, self-sufficient ecosystem itself. We are creating a model that can be deployed in any rural community in America, helping them build resilient economies, access modern healthcare, and create high-tech jobs.
We are done trying to sail today’s boat on yesterday’s wind. We’ve built a new one, and we invite you to see where it takes us.