Construction

Get your house in order before you buy any AI

Annija Eizenarma on the records legacy operators need in order before onboarding, and why missing them turns an AI rollout into months of assembly.

Organize your own records before you evaluate a single AI product. Annija Eizenarma — a founder, investor and adviser who has spent seven years building technology businesses in legacy industries — told Artificial Reality, the AI buyer-evidence podcast hosted by Galina Fendikevich, that fragmented data is the most common problem she sees, and that onboarding an AI system without it takes multiple months.

Her instruction to operators is four words: "Get your house in order."

What does getting your house in order actually mean?

It means a specific set of records, current and structured, not a general sense of tidiness. Eizenarma was unusually concrete about the list, which is rare in this conversation and useful because you can act on it:

"Having full transparency of your finances, your balance sheet, your financial statements, your assets, your full asset lists and depreciation and EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, and all of these things — having very clear, organized manner of how you structure that is important. If you can do it, do it as soon as possible."

Beside the financial half sits the operational half she describes elsewhere in the same interview: the information about your clients, their preferences, and your projects. In most legacy businesses that information already exists. It is spread across systems that do not talk to each other, which is not the same as having it.

Why does a vendor need this before they can onboard you?

Because onboarding is a data transfer, and no vendor can do it on your behalf. Eizenarma described the mechanics plainly:

"If you wanna even integrate an AI solution to run the business more efficiently, they will need to onboard you. And in order for them to onboard you, they will need a lot of data. And if you don't have that data, it will be really inconvenient for you and for them to work together. It will take multiple months to get all of the information about your clients, about their preferences, whatever, their projects."

Read that carefully. The obstacle is not the integration, the security review, or the price. It is that the raw material the system runs on has to be assembled first, and the only people who can assemble it are the ones who already have the day job.

How much does skipping this step cost?

Multiple months, on Eizenarma's account — spent gathering client, preference and project records before the software does anything visible. Artificial Reality's read is that most pilots do not survive that delay. Attention moves, the budget cycle resets, and the person who championed the tool is running something else by the time it produces a result.

The cost is therefore not the cleanup. It is that the cleanup arrives at the worst possible moment, attached to a decision you have already made.

When should you do it?

Before it is needed, because every moment it becomes necessary is a moment when there is no time to do it. An investment, a new partner, a valuation, a sale, an AI deployment — each of those starts a clock, and each of them wants the same records. Eizenarma's own phrasing on timing is the actionable part: if you can do it, do it as soon as possible.

What should you organize first?

Work through this in order. Each item is either named by Eizenarma or drawn directly from her description of what an onboarding needs:

Financial statements and a balance sheet that are current rather than reconstructed at year end.
A full asset list with depreciation, so the picture of what you own survives a question about it.
EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, with the adjustments written down rather than remembered.
One consolidated client record — who they are, what they have bought, what they prefer — instead of four partial versions.
Project history in one place, including the jobs that did not go well.
An inventory of which system each of the above lives in, which is the map any vendor will ask you for on day one.

That last item doubles as a self-diagnosis. Eizenarma opens conversations with legacy operators by asking what they run today — a Salesforce CRM, a QuickBooks integration, or sticky notes — because the current stack tells her how much change the company can absorb. Answering that question for yourself before a vendor asks it is free, and it tells you which of the six items above is genuinely missing rather than merely scattered.

Does being unorganized mean you are behind?

No. Eizenarma's read on the anxiety underneath this is that adoption is a sequence operators have already been through twice:

"Business owners really can be motivated with the right approach to adopt technology, because they also don't want to miss out, right? They start to use computers eventually, they start to use Google for things, and it's the next wave of it."

That framing is more accurate than the version most vendors sell, and considerably less threatening. You are not late to a revolution. You are at the beginning of the third adoption in a working lifetime, and the preparation is the same as it was for the first two.

So pick the record set most likely to be asked for first — for most operators that is financial statements plus one consolidated client list — and get it into a single, current, exportable form this quarter. Do it while nothing depends on it. Then take the vendor meeting.