I've been building AI systems for the past year — autonomous agents, content pipelines, the full stack. But most of what I've built has been for other engineers. This month I started asking a different question: what do the businesses around me actually need?
I live in Port Allen, Louisiana. West Baton Rouge Parish. Between here and Baton Rouge, there are thousands of small businesses — barber shops, law offices, contractors, restaurants, auto shops, real estate agents — and most of them are running on phone calls, paper calendars, and the occasional text message.
They don't need "enterprise AI platforms." They need specific tools that solve specific problems they deal with every day. So that's what I'm building.
Tool 1: CounselAI — Legal Document Analysis
There are 42 attorneys in West Baton Rouge Parish. Most of them are solo practitioners or small firms. They don't have associates to do first-pass document review. They read every contract themselves.
CounselAI reads a legal document and flags risks, extracts deadlines, cites relevant Louisiana Civil Code articles, and translates legalese into plain English — in 30 seconds. It's built specifically for Louisiana's civil law system, which means it knows about community property, redhibition, forced heirship, and the dozen other things that generic legal AI tools miss.
I wrote more about the technical details in a separate post. The short version: upload a PDF, pick what you want to know, get structured findings back before your coffee cools down.
Tool 2: Flood Zone & Property Lookup
If you buy or sell property in the Baton Rouge metro area, flood zone matters. It determines whether you need flood insurance, what it costs, and sometimes whether a deal goes through at all.
The tool I built queries FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer and the parish assessor's office in real time. Enter an address in East or West Baton Rouge Parish and get:
- FEMA flood zone designation (A, AE, X, etc.)
- Risk level and whether flood insurance is required
- Property owner, assessed value, lot size, and ward
- Interactive map with flood zone overlay
All from public data that's freely available but scattered across three different government websites that nobody wants to navigate.
Tool 3: BookLocal — AI Appointment Booking
Every missed call is a missed appointment. For a barber shop or an HVAC contractor, that's real money walking out the door.
BookLocal is an AI assistant that handles appointment booking via text message, 24 hours a day. Customer texts "I need a haircut Saturday morning" and gets back available slots, confirms a time, and sends a reminder. No app to download. No website to visit. Just text.
It handles the things a receptionist would handle: scheduling, rescheduling, answering questions about hours and prices, managing a walk-in waitlist, and following up after appointments to ask for Google reviews.
For a business that can't afford a full-time receptionist — or whose receptionist is also the person cutting hair — this is the difference between catching a customer and losing them to whoever answers their phone next.
Why Local
I could build generic SaaS products and sell them to anyone with a credit card. The reason I'm starting local is simpler than strategy: I live here. I can walk into these businesses. I can sit across from the owner, show them the tool on my laptop, and ask what I got wrong.
That feedback loop is irreplaceable. Engineers who build in isolation build the wrong things. I'd rather have five users who tell me what they actually need than a thousand who signed up and never came back.
And honestly, the Baton Rouge market is underserved. The big AI vendors are selling to law firms in New York and tech companies in San Francisco. Nobody is building specifically for a barber shop in Port Allen or a solo attorney in West Baton Rouge Parish. That's an opportunity.
If you're a business owner in East or West Baton Rouge Parish and any of these tools sound useful, I want to hear from you. I'm building these to solve real problems, and the best way to make them better is to use them on your problems.
Reach me at [email protected]. I'm in Port Allen — probably five minutes from wherever you are.