01 · AI Fundamentals
What's actually happening when AI answers: where the words come from, why some of them are made up, how much it can hold in its head, and why the way you ask changes what you get.
AI fundamentals for founders and ops leaders
AI fundamentals for founders and ops leaders. Dejargonized.
Free. No signup. No mailing list. Read what you need.
Free. No signup. No mailing list. Read what you need.
What Horizon is
Section titled “What Horizon is”Every business now makes AI decisions: what to adopt, what to skip, what to trust with real work. Those calls land on founders, CXOs and ops leaders, and they deserve firmer ground than headlines and vendor demos. Horizon is that ground: how AI works, where it fails, and how it fits a real business, in plain English.
We wrote it because we needed it. Comet Lab puts AI to work inside company operations every day, and every engagement starts with the same questions. Horizon answers them once, at the right depth, in one place, open to anyone who has to decide.
What’s here
Section titled “What’s here”Read the modules in order if you’re new to all this. Dip in anywhere if you’re not.
02 · The AI Tools Landscape
The AI you buy, the model underneath it, and the platform it runs on are three different things. Who makes what, and how open and closed models divide the market.
03 · What AI Can and Can't Do at Work
An honest account of what AI does well at work, where it fails, and the three ways to make it better at a specific job.
- 3.1 What AI is good at in business operations
- 3.2 What AI is bad at in business operations
- 3.3 How AI uses tools and memory
- 3.4 How AI connects to company systems
- 3.5 AI agents: when AI takes action
- 3.6 Why AI is unexpectedly good at code
- 3.7 Prompting, RAG, and fine-tuning
- 3.8 What gets built around the model
- 3.9 Testing AI before trusting it
04 · AI Risk & Trust
Where your data goes, who owns what AI produces, what quietly goes wrong, and the controls that keep people in charge.
05 · Putting AI to Work
How AI lands inside a real operation: spotting where it fits, build versus buy, what a good project looks like, and how you know it's working.
Who writes this
Section titled “Who writes this”The people at Comet Lab. We deploy AI inside our own work. We built Horizon to help others think clearly about deploying it inside theirs.
Chapters are added as the field moves and as gaps surface. If something here is wrong, or could be plainer, write to us at hello@cometlab.ai.