At gadgetcircle, AI drafts meet human checks on rugged tech
mike jones is a manager at gadgetcircle, which provides rugged devices and warehouse equipment and solutions. In this conversation, mike explains how AI helps with product copy, why technical specifications still need human review, and how buyers are beginning to use AI answers to research rugged tech.
AI can speed up routine product writing, but technical details need to be checked before publication. For personal communication with customers and suppliers, mike prefers to write directly, while keeping product facts accurate for both people and AI search tools.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I started Gadget Circle in 2026. Early on I saw that people working on building sites, in warehouses and out in the field were badly served. They’d buy a normal phone or scanner, it would break within months, and when they went looking for something tougher they’d find either cheap kit that didn’t last or business suppliers that wouldn’t talk to them unless they ordered hundreds of units. So we focused purely on rugged tech: devices built for people who work hard and can’t afford downtime.
What makes us different is that we sit in the middle. We take the time to help a sole trader pick the right phone as seriously as we handle a fifty-unit order for a warehouse. Our advice is honest, even when that means telling someone the cheaper option will do the job. Most of our customers come back, and that’s the only measure we really care about.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Right now most of our new customers find us online. Some come through search when they’re looking for a specific device, and a growing number come through social media, where people see the kit and buy it on the spot. It’s mostly individuals buying one device for themselves, which is great, and those customers often come back.
Where I’d like more of it to come from is businesses. A warehouse that needs scanners for the whole team, or a construction firm kitting out its site managers with phones that won’t die on day one. Those customers stay with you for years and come back every time they grow. We’re building towards that now, and every month a few more business orders come in. I’d love that to become the bigger part of what we do.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
The thing I’ve handed over is first drafts. Product descriptions, spec summaries, the routine write-ups every online shop needs. AI gets me a starting point in minutes instead of an hour, and then I go through it and fix what it got wrong. With technical products it does get things wrong, so I never let it publish anything on its own.
The thing I went back on is writing to people. Earlier this year I let AI draft a pitch to an editor at a well-known publication. Every fact in it was true, but the editor ran it through a detector, saw it was AI-written and turned it down. That was a fair call. If I’m asking someone for their time, they should hear from me, not a machine. Now anything personal, whether it’s to an editor, a supplier or a customer with a problem, I write myself. It takes longer, but people can tell the difference.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Yes, a big change. Customers used to message us with very basic questions, like “is this waterproof?” Now a lot of them arrive having already done their homework. They’ve compared two or three models, they know what drop rating or battery life they need, and they’re really just checking a final detail or asking about price for a few units. The conversations are shorter and more useful on both sides.
On AI assistants, it’s early but it’s started. When we check, our pages are already being cited as sources by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI answers on rugged phone and scanner questions. It isn’t a big source of customers yet, and it’s hard to track exactly who came from where. But I’d be surprised if it isn’t one of our main channels within a couple of years. People are asking an AI “what’s the best rugged phone for a builder” instead of scrolling through ten websites, and you want to be the answer it gives.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do: Get your facts right. In rugged tech, the specs are the product. If you say a phone survives a two-metre drop and it doesn’t, you’ve lost that customer and everyone they talk to. AI tools will happily repeat whatever you publish, so make sure what you publish is correct. Second, pick a lane. Trying to sell everything to everyone is how you end up competing on price with Amazon. And third, talk to your customers like a person. The more automated everything gets, the more a real reply stands out.
Ignore: The pressure to be everywhere at once. You don’t need to post on every platform every day or jump on every new AI tool the week it launches. Pick the two or three channels where your buyers actually are and do those properly. Also, ignore anyone selling you a shortcut, whether it’s thousands of cheap backlinks, fake reviews, or “AI that runs your whole business”. If it sounds too easy, Google and your customers will see through it soon enough.
Thank you to mike jones and the team at gadgetcircle for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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