Since 2009 I have been selling things you can touch: roofing, facades, fencing. A dealer network across Russia and neighbouring markets, live operations with seasonality and people in them. In recent years I have been working on what you cannot touch: the processes that used to live in my head are moving to AI agents.
What I do
A building-materials trading company of my own, and alongside it the partner network of a large manufacturing group. All of my work revolves around one question: how to sell a manufactured product through people and processes. Partner and dealer networks, launching trade brands from zero, marketing and presence online. One of the group's trade brands I came up with and grew myself. I do not name the brands here: they are companies with their own owners, and this site is about my experience, not theirs.
Why AI
For more than five years I kept noticing the same pattern: tasks arrived in the planner faster than I could cross them off. Ideas, improvements and plans piled up as a stack of notes about five centimetres high, and the time went to urgent matters.
I have worked with AI since 2023. Back then you could follow it out of the corner of your eye. At the end of 2025 that stopped working: models and agents moved in leaps, everything changed within a couple of months, and keeping up became a job of its own. I went into self-study and quickly hit a wall: fragmented knowledge, slow progress, a lot of noise and little system. What gave me a base was building: agents and workflows that go into production, with the code in the open.
Now all the time free from operations goes into digitising the business: what lived in my head and in scattered files becomes documents a model can work with. What used to need a contractor, a specification and negotiations is now done by an agent under my control. That is the path I record here, with numbers and mistakes. The code is at github.com/bablobanov.
Principles
- Your data stays yours: nothing about a client goes public without informed consent
- I recommend only what I have been through or built myself
- Numbers come with a source; other people's numbers I mark as unverified
- I write rarely, but to the point
Updated: 22 September 2026