Post by Katharine Wolf

In February 2023, a client called me and said he had used ChatGPT 3.0 to complete in one weekend what would have taken 10 Odettians six months to do. And he did it for $20. With better accuracy.   That was my oh crap moment.   Overnight, our text classification business was displaced. Automated. Over.   In the 60 days that followed, I moved fast. I identified an AI lead. We built an AI prompt academy and trained our project leads. We rolled out AI-powered services and passed the savings directly to our clients. We also did layoffs, something that felt like cutting off a part of myself.   Over the next year, I slumped into what I would lovingly call my Armageddon mindset. Everything felt doomed. Work itself felt temporary. When clients didn’t buy, I thought, of course. They know AI can do this.   This was a huge shift from how I had built Odetta, Inc.. Before, I operated from abundance. I believed everyone I met could benefit from our services, and they did. That helped us build partnerships with more than 400 tech clients in five years. But now, I couldn’t see a future.   Subconsciously, I believed we were no longer useful. And that belief started shaping what I saw and what showed up. Yes, there was a tech recession. Yes, our clients were impacted by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. But I also knew something deeper was at play, both in me and in the company.   It was a year of staring into the belly of the machine and asking: what’s still worth doing?   In November 2024, while navigating some deeper leadership work surfacing through Odetta, I attended a 10-day meditation retreat with Dr. Joe Dispenza. I didn’t go to fix the business. I went because I was lost inside it.   That’s when the real shift happened.   For 10 days, I trained my mind out of scarcity. Every time fear crept in, I called it out. I practiced holding an intention, like new contracts flowing in, and pairing it with the elevated emotions I wanted to feel: joy, pride, purpose.   By the end of the retreat, something fundamental had changed. Not just in theory, but at a cellular level. I left truly believing that Odetta had a role to play in this AI future.   And almost immediately, the evidence showed up. Just enough to help me believe. While I was still on retreat, four new contracts landed in my inbox. Two weeks later, a PE fund began introducing us to their entire portfolio. We started landing large-scale, high-value data projects, cleaning #RevOps and contract data in Salesforce and NetSuite for billion-dollar clients, with deployments of 20 to 50 Odettians.   Since then, we’ve had our busiest months ever. We hired new Odettians for the first time since 2022.   Once I stopped operating from fear, I could finally make sense of what was really happening to work. Not just at Odetta, but across the entire landscape.   And through hundreds of conversations, client projects, and internal reinvention, here’s what I’ve come to understand.