The difference is never the tech. It's whether the people are ready. Michael Wakefield founded SplashCandy around that one observation.
Michael has been active in business through the '90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s — inside multinationals, in small and medium businesses, and in companies of his own. He's been in sales since the early '90s, and in that time watched the cell phone arrive, then the internet, then APIs, and now AI. Each one landed the same way: some companies adopted it well and some failed, and the difference always came down to how management shifted and where the company kept its focus.
He had a strong computer background in school and chose sales instead. Back then that was a real fork in the road — programming was a gate, and you were on one side of it or the other. AI removed the gate. People with imagination can now build the things they imagine. SplashCandy is built on the idea that we're entering an age of imagination, and it rewards the two things Michael has spent a career practicing: process-tree thinking — how decisions flow, how work moves through logic — and the imagination to see what a business could become.
AI feels big, so the decision gets postponed. Meetings happen, articles get forwarded, and the business keeps running exactly the way it always has.
A business grabs the nearest product with AI on the label instead of asking what it actually needs. The tool arrives, the workflow doesn't fit it, and a few months later everyone quietly goes back to the old way.
Both come from skipping the same question: what does this business actually need?
We start with the AI Readiness Assessment — a written look at your business: what's worth doing first, what's not worth buying yet, and what your people need so the change actually takes. From there we teach, build, or both, depending on what the assessment shows.
Some clients need training. Some need a build. Some need a person holding the AI seat while the ground is still unfamiliar — and as your team learns, you should outgrow us and hire your own person. When that happens, the partnership becomes occasional and project-specific: we come back for the projects that need us.
See the AI Readiness Assessment