Five hundred loops from an operator to the product she needs

The unbuilt product in yacht charter is not a charter-specific model. It is tooling accessible enough for a brokerage with no engineers to build one. Jennifer Kerum, co-founder of Anchor Croatia, a luxury charter brokerage on the Adriatic, is nine years into the business, trying to build that platform herself, and describes the current route as going through "five hundred loops."

She is not a buyer waiting to be sold to. She is a builder without tools, and the workflow she would automate first is the largest unpaid cost in her business.

What is she trying to build, and where is she stuck?

A platform and website for a separate AI-focused brand, Luxury Yacht Rentals, launching in the coming months. The blocker is that the tooling is not reachable without a technical team.

"I would really love the accessibility and easy integration. Right now I am trying to build this platform and this website, and I'm really struggling to find the tools to actually help me get to where I am. We're doing it. It's just like — it's like this, you know?"

Her benchmark for what accessible should mean is website builders: "When you think about when you used to build a website twenty years ago, you needed to have a web developer, right? And now you have so many different programs that even if you didn't know anything about websites, you could just plug and play."

That comparison is the entire request. Website building crossed from specialist skill to consumer product. AI application building has not, and she is running into the gap: "It would be nice to see it more accessible, and to not have to go through like five hundred loops."

Her description of how AI capability is actually distributed is the most quotable diagnosis in the interview: "I feel like there's only a small portion of people that really understand how to use AI. And then I feel like there's everyone else that is just like: I'm hungry, what do I eat?"

What would she automate first?

Intake — specifically, teaching clients what they are buying before they can specify it. On her estimate it affects about eighty percent of clients and can run six weeks per conversation.

"Have you seen Below Deck? Everybody loves Below Deck. And when they call for a yacht, they all want that boat. They go, 'Hello, Jennifer, I would like this boat, I like this boat from Below Deck.' I'm like, great, what's your budget?"

The gap that follows: "Someone goes, 'I need a jacuzzi, I need five staff, I need everything, I want to be below deck, I need this and this and this,' and I'm like, okay, great — two hundred and fifty thousand. And they're like, 'No, no, no, I want maybe eight thousand.' I'm like, so a sailboat."

The scale: "We almost spend so much time in the process of teaching the clients what it is to yacht. And that's not for every client, but I would say it's for about eighty percent of our clients." And why it is a business problem rather than a service cost: "It's really time consuming, and then not all reservations come through. So you've spent maybe a month and a half talking with a client."

Two costs, both unpaid, both landing before any revenue is committed. She notes the same dynamic is worse in yacht sales, where cycles run longer still.

Why has nobody built this?

Kerum's view is that the industry is simply skipped: "charter companies and even sales companies and yachting almost get forgotten in the AI world. There isn't a lot of tools that cater to us."

Galina Fendikevich, who hosts Artificial Reality, the AI buyer-evidence podcast, offered the builder-side explanation: AI builders would rather run hackathons and eat pizza indoors than get on a boat. Kerum's response was an open invitation — come out on one, hang around, help solve her problems.

An operator with an articulated product need is publicly offering builders access to her business, and the reason nobody has taken it is geographic and cultural rather than economic.

What is the cost nobody prices?

Retraining. Kerum is clear that shipping is not the end of the project.

"Even once we implement all of this, then we're going to have to go to a training program to actually train our employees. So it's going to be a two-step process. But it's also exciting, you know."

Vendors sell implementation. Operators buy implementation plus retraining a team whose value is relationship judgment rather than software fluency — invisible in every pitch, real in every rollout.

What still has no playbook at all?

Being found. Kerum calls AI discovery "a new science" and asks the question directly: "how does AI find us? And how do we cater to that?" Published material goes stale — "a lot of stuff even online is either outdated, because AI's changing so fast" — so her method is trial and error plus attending conferences. Her summary: "I need a human component to learn about the computer."

What to build, in order

• The accessibility layer. Whoever makes AI application building plug-and-play sells to every overlooked industry at once, not to yacht charter.
• Structured intake for high-consideration services. Budget, expectations and feasibility resolved before a human joins. Eighty percent of clients and six-week cycles are the prize.
• Honest domain boundaries. Anything touching live conditions defers to the captain, explicitly.
• A retraining path priced into the sale. Not a support article. A program, quoted.

The question for anyone building horizontal AI tooling: how many loops stand between your product and an operator with a nine-year-old business, a clear specification, and no engineers?

Where this comes from

S1E2: How a luxury yacht company uses AI without losing the personal touch — the full interview with Jennifer Kerum. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.