About

I'm Richard Schmidt. I own Valley Tree Care, a tree care company in the Phoenix area with about 80 people on the team. We prune, remove, plant, and keep trees alive in the desert. It's physical work: crews in the air and customers on the phone, with a schedule that has no slack in it.

I've been following AI since reading Prediction Machines in 2018, and I got access to the OpenAI Playground in 2022. When the models finally got useful, I started pointing them at my own company instead of going off to found something new.

The result is HappyStack, a fleet of automations that handle the glue work of the business, the routing, the follow-up, the reporting. When a lead comes in it reaches the right team in minutes instead of sitting in an inbox until somebody checks, and every inbound call gets reviewed so a missed booking still gets a callback. Reports go out on schedule without anybody writing them. There are watchdogs too. The team behind it is Happy Labs, my in-house group for research, automation, and generative AI engineering. Happy tools, happy people. It all exists to run this one company well.

These automations run where a missed lead is a missed job and a silent failure costs money, so they get tested hard every day. When people ask what AI adoption looks like for a normal company, I can usually answer from the logs.

I don't know exactly where it's headed yet. The ambition is an AI-native company, where automation is the default and people spend their time on the judgment calls and the customers. Maybe a proper lab grows out of it. For now the daily work comes first.

Gabrielle and I met right out of high school. Twelve years of marriage and three kids later, home is a busier operation than the company. Honestly, that is most of why I automate: every hour a system handles is an hour I am not doing paperwork after dinner.

If any of that is useful to you, follow along. I publish what I learn as I go. You can reach me at richard@richardschmidt.ai.