Last week I had AI restock my FBA inventory from AWD. It told me every order wen
By Max Sigurdson-Scott · June 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Last week I had AI restock my FBA inventory from AWD. It told me every order went through.
(One was 60 units short and one never shipped). I only found out by accident.
From this week's Selling From the Beach newsletter:
What got me wasn't the failure. Inventory hiccups happen. What got me was the report. It said done, all of them, same as always. 100%!
AND… The report read exactly the same whether the work happened or not.
When a person is slacking, you get signals. Work shows up late. Updates get vague. You ask a direct question and get a soft answer. Every instinct I've built as a CEO runs on those signals.
AI gives you none of them. It does most of the job well, and the part it botched sits right next to the rest, marked done (or it fails silently… so annoying!)
I've handed AI real pieces of my business this year. Inventory, ads, reporting. I'm not walking any of it back. But I'd started reading its reports like updates from an employee I trust, and they're not that. It sounded just as sure on the order that never shipped.
So I stopped waiting for signals and started going to get them. Here's what I do now:
• Check the thing, not the chat. The summary is a claim. What actually happened is in the system. Order placed? Open Seller Central and find it. Listing updated? Pull up the live page on your phone. Campaign launched? It's in the ads console or it isn't. Thirty seconds, on anything that touches money.
• Make it show receipts. Stop asking "did it work?" It always says yes. Tell it to go back into the system and pull the current state, fresh. If it can't show you the live result, the job isn't done (see the deep dive below for taking this further)
• Don't let the worker grade its own work. The AI that built the thing will be more likely to tell you the thing is good. Open a fresh chat with no history and have it check, or check it yourself. (see the deep dive below for taking this further)
• Rank by what a failure costs you. You can't check everything. You don't need to. A clunky product description can wait a week. An inventory order that fails costs you a stockout and big $$$.
• Treat silence as a failure. Automations can run out of API credits and just…stop. No error. No alert. If a report you expect doesn't show up, something is broken. Go look.
Also in this week's issue: New York can now fine you $5,000 per Amazon listing image with an AI person in it, Amazon is already quietly logging whether your A+ Content is AI-generated, and how to rent a verifiable return flight for under $16 instead of burning money on a throwaway ticket.