AI Sovereign Domain
Why AI is the Competitive Weapon You’re Not Using Yet
Introduction
There are executives, entrepreneurs, and opportunity creators who are currently developing AI as a competitive weapon. If I were still running my company, I would be using it as one. I have already created an application in two days that would have taken three weeks without AI. That application would have saved me $100,000 a year while making the operation run smoother.
I grew my business in the Chicago market. We were in the telecommunications and data networking industry. These are two of the most brutal markets you could operate in. Small companies needed to be agile, creative, and cost-effective to win.
The big boys hated competing against my company. They knew we were going to twist them around and make them perform. I did not win every deal, but I won more than my fair share, and nobody got away without a fight. I believe my creativity and ability to implement that creativity would have risen to new levels with AI. As we speak, I am developing my own sovereign domain that I can use to expand my reach back into business if I so desire.
## Sovereign Domain
AI is a competitive tool, and those who master it are going to win. This means using it to amplify and expand your abilities. It does not mean replacing your critical thinking with mindless AI responses to prompts. Forward-thinking executives and business owners are already using AI as a competitive weapon. The sovereign domain is the key to developing AI as one.
An AI sovereign domain is an architectural framework that enables you to maximize AI in your business and personal activities. It operates under the assumption that you are driving AI and that AI is not driving you. Claude Opus 4.5 details the basic architecture as follows:
**Your decision architecture** — the principles, priorities, and judgment calls you’ve refined over years of experience, most of which you’ve never written down.
**Your information architecture** — how your knowledge, documents, and data are organized, connected, and accessible, rather than scattered across platforms and trapped in your memory.
**Your process architecture** — the repeatable workflows where your judgment matters but your time is the constraint.
People who have spent years building clarity in these three areas can immediately deploy AI as a force multiplier. People operating from chaos just get faster chaos.
The question is not whether you are using AI. It is whether you have built a sovereign domain worth extending.
I am a retired CEO. It is one of my main regrets in life that this technology was not available to me earlier. I would have kicked even more ass and grown the company way faster. This is not an assumption. I tested this hypothesis to see if it really worked.
As I look back over my career, there was never enough time and money to put in the scaling infrastructure that I needed to grow the company as fast as I would have liked. This includes improving marketing, upgrading administrative systems, better documentation of policies and procedures, as well as a variety of other important activities that I always had to push aside to handle immediate problems or opportunities. AI would have changed all that.
For example, in the last 30 days using AI, I developed the following programs and applications to support my own personal infrastructure:
1. An app script to reorganize my email.
1. A separate Google Drive to store documents for the sovereign domain, along with an app script that could move specified documents from my personal Google Drive.
1. A program that creates automatic, branded, and editable slides by entering information into a spreadsheet and converting it to a Google Slides presentation.
1. An AI agent that goes through our project management system and identifies overdue tasks by assignee. It creates an email and sends it to everyone involved while copying their manager and myself. The email includes their overdue tasks and an impact statement on the company. This replaced a manual process that took 15 to 20 hours per week.
1. The migration of a website from GoDaddy to Squarespace while upgrading the content.
1. A private RAG document management system that stores my important content locally and only sends the pertinent information to the large language model.
I did this on my own. If I had access to my original technical staff, I would have accomplished more, faster. I have identified over $700,000 a year in savings that I could have generated with AI. The impact on product development and product rollout cannot be quantified now, but I believe I would have generated significantly more revenue with these tools.
## Summary
A personal sovereign domain is a competitive tool that you can use to advance your own and your company’s interests. Currently, there are tens of thousands of entrepreneurs trying to figure out how to use AI in their business. The ones who are successful will be the winners. The ones who fail to understand how this works — the world will leave them behind.
My next blog will explain how I am building out my sovereign domain. This includes everything from data architecture to AI agent development and implementation. I hope it will be helpful, and I look forward to hearing from anyone who wants to share how they are planning to achieve their own sovereign domain.