Find your
Achilles heel.

Full disclosure, said plainly: the author, Jeremy Evans, builds and sells these systems. The operating system in the novel is the working method of Alacritous, a product of Thrice, the author's firm. The fiction was kept clean of it: no product in the story is named or sold in it. Your result stays free; only the optional field guide, the book waitlist and the strategy-call waitlist ask for an email.

Because the failures that sink AI in production don't look like failures when they happen: a green dashboard, a fluent rationale, a great demo, a sensible ban. A story makes you sit through the week each rule didn't exist. You get the playbook too: the whole operating system is in the back of the book, bare, for anyone who wants to run it on Monday morning.

Strategy books end where this one starts. In the novel, the strategy is a single page handed over on the first morning. The rest of the book is the part that decides whether it works: who owns each answer, what checks it, what it costs per record, and whether the record holds up when an outsider pulls a file.

The system rests on two tests that have nothing to do with insurance: can a machine now read this work, and is it cheap to be wrong? The last chapter makes the point in the story itself, when a freight-logistics leader maps the system onto her own operation: "Same ladder. Different nouns."

No. In the novel the AI keeps failing until the company builds owners, checks and a meter around it. It grades a fatality as moderate, writes a perfect rationale on top of an error that became a zero, and one month costs $247,311.08. The book's thesis is that nearly every failure of AI adoption is organizational, not technical.

Start where your problem is. Each of the twenty-nine chapters turns on one problem, and the titles say which: "It Ticked" is the AI bill, and "Whose Throat to Choke" is ownership. If you want the system first, the back matter stands on its own.

No, on purpose. The models in the novel are fictional, and the book calls its prices "period pieces" because they'll be out of date by the time you read them. What it gives you is the discipline for choosing: score any new model on your own held-out cases, cast each one to the task, and never sign away a falling price curve.

Not yet. It's coming to Amazon. Join the waitlist and we'll send one email when it's there.

No. Lares Specialty Insurance and everyone in it are fiction; in the author's words, the names in the novel are masks. The method isn't: it's the one the author's team builds for clients.

Mostly for organizational reasons, not technical ones. RAND interviewed 65 experienced data scientists and engineers, and the first root cause they found was that stakeholders "misunderstand—or miscommunicate—what problem needs to be solved using AI" (RAND, 2024). McKinsey's 2026 survey finds that nearly nine in ten organizations use AI, but only 37% see any EBIT impact (McKinsey, 2026). The assessment looks for exactly that gap: the rung your floor is missing.

No. The result, the field guide and the rules stand on their own. The novel is where you watch Don Calder climb the same rungs with 120 days on the clock, and its back matter lays out the whole operating system.

Anyone who has to say where their company's AI adoption really stands: operations leaders, AI leads, and the finance and technology heads who share the call. The scenes are written for any industry. The novel happens to be set at an insurer; the questions aren't.

Every answer is a real practice, and certain answers are the evidence a stage needs. A stage holds when every answer that evidences it is strong enough. Your floor is the highest stage that holds with every stage below it holding too. Your slide is the highest stage any of your answers reach, and the stages between them are the rungs you skipped. Your Achilles heel is the weakest answer standing between your floor and the next stage.

Your answers are scored in your browser, and this browser remembers your progress so you can come back. Your result lives in its own link, which is why sharing it needs no account. When you finish, an anonymous record of your calculated stage helps us compare completed assessments, and your ten-piece values contribute to monthly averages. The completion keeps neither your result code, your page-visit ID nor your individual score profile. For the optional field guide, we store your email, any name you give, and your result for 24 months, and delete them when you ask. How we handle your data The book waitlist stores your email and launch-only consent, with any campaign tags or referring domain, without your answers or result. We also count which steps visitors reach, with no cookies.

Alacritous takes a limited number of strategy calls, so there's a waitlist. You see your real place in it, and Alacritous works through it in order, emailing you when it's your turn. When you join from a result, your request includes that result. The assessment and the field guide are free. Alacritous's work is a paid service, and it discusses scope and cost with you directly, not on this site.