Robi Kanoff Unfiltered -- The Grind Report

Friday, September 18, 2026

How Many AI Systems Are Running Your Business? Most Owners Can't Answer That.

Go ahead and count them. Your CRM has AI in it now. So does your HR platform, your email, your scheduling tool and your marketing software. Add Claude, ChatGPT and whatever else your team picked up this month. And then there's the one that shows up uninvited: the AI note taker. Most owners I talk to can't give me a number, because none of it was ever really "bought." It crept in through a feature update, a free trial or somebody's browser tab.

Let's talk about that note taker, because it's the one that's already in court. Otter.ai is being sued in a federal class action in California. The plaintiffs allege the tool joins meetings and records conversations without every participant agreeing to it, and that it uses those recordings to train its AI. They also allege Otter puts the burden of getting consent on its customers, meaning you. Otter disputes it, and these are allegations, not verdicts. But this August a federal judge let the core privacy claims move forward, including the ones under California and Illinois law.

Here's why those two states matter. California requires all parties to consent before a private conversation is recorded, and its law allows $5,000 per violation without the plaintiff proving any harm. Illinois has its Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires written consent before collecting a voiceprint. AI note takers that label who said what can be creating exactly that. Fireflies was hit with an Illinois BIPA class action in December. And here's the part that should get your attention: you don't choose which state's law your call falls under. One prospect in California or Illinois, and your team hitting "record" can pull you into it.

Now add the part nobody wants to look at: your employees' personal AI. A recent PagerDuty survey of 1,250 office professionals found 66 percent have used AI tools their company never approved, and 34 percent admitted sharing customer data with them. Picture a rep connecting a personal note taker to their own calendar. Now it's sitting in your client calls, saving transcripts to an account you can't see, can't audit and can't get back. Nobody in that story is a bad actor. They're just trying to work faster, and you never gave them a rule or a safe tool.

So where do you start? With the basics. List every AI system in your business and who owns it. Decide who approves the next one. Tell your team when recording is allowed, how consent gets captured, and what data never goes into a public tool. Get the vendors' commitments in writing instead of assuming. But building all of that is one thing. Proving it, to a customer, a regulator or a courtroom, is another.

That is exactly why Chris Trocola founded AICT, and it's why I'm an AI compliance adviser there. AICT's certification is a standard for business layer AI governance, structured around existing federal and state law, built so a business can show it did this right before anyone asks. Not after the complaint. Not after the lawsuit. Before.

You can't govern what you can't count. So count. Then send me your number.

Not sure where you stand? Reach out.

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AI Is Not Going to Wait for Your Paperwork

Every business owner I talk to right now is racing to plug AI into something. Pricing, marketing, customer service, hiring, lending decisions. Almost nobody is racing to prove they did it responsibly. That gap, between adoption speed and documentation speed, is exactly where the next wave of lawsuits, fines, and PR disasters is going to come from.

Here's the part people miss. This isn't really about big tech companies worrying about federal regulators or the EU. The real exposure is at the small and mid sized business level. A lending shop uses AI to score applicants. A service company uses it to screen leads. An employer uses it to rank resumes. Somewhere in there, AI made a decision that affected a real person, and nobody wrote down why. Then a customer complains, or somebody asks a question, and there's no paper trail at all.

Hiring is actually one of the clearest examples. The EEOC already has a yardstick here, it's called the four fifths rule, some people call it the eighty percent rule. If any protected group is getting selected at less than eighty percent of the rate of whichever group is doing best, that's treated as evidence of adverse impact. You don't need bad intentions to get flagged for this, the math does the flagging by itself. So if a company can't show it ever checked its own AI hiring tool against that standard, that's not a small gap, that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

This is exactly the blind spot a firm called AICT is built around. AICT deploys the first certification standard for business layer AI governance, structured around existing federal and state law. What that means in plain terms is they certify that a business has actually built the documentation required to defend its AI decisions, before anyone ever asks for it.

Compliance isn't the fun part of running a business. It never has been. But it's the part that keeps you in business long enough to enjoy the fun part. Treat your AI like it already has to survive an audit, even if nobody's auditing you yet. Make sure your documentation is courtroom ready, because eventually, somebody will ask.

Not sure your AI would survive an audit? Reach out. I'm an AI compliance adviser with AICT. Tell me which AI tools your business uses to make decisions about hiring, lending, or customers, and I'll help you find the gaps and figure out what to do about them. Use the contact form on this page or reach me at any of the links below. Do it this week, before somebody else asks the question for you.

📧 robikanoff@gmail.com
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🌐 Blog: robikanoff.blogspot.com

Friday, September 11, 2026

Why Mechanics Lien Laws Aren't One-Size-Fits-All — And Why That Matters More Than You Think

If you work in solar, electrical, or any trade where you do the work before you get paid, you've probably heard of a mechanics lien. What most people in this industry don't realize is how differently these laws work depending on which state you're standing in — and how quickly that difference can cost you the money you're owed

A mechanics lien isn't a formality. It's a deadline-driven legal process, and every state runs it differently.

Some of the ways states diverge:

Notice requirements. Several states require a "preliminary notice" or "notice of intent to lien" sent to the property owner before you can ever file a lien — sometimes within days of starting work. Miss that window, and you may lose your lien rights entirely, regardless of how legitimate your claim is.
Filing deadlines. The window to actually file a lien after completing work ranges anywhere from 60 to 120+ days depending on the state. Some states count from the last day you worked on the project; others count from the last delivery of materials. Get the date wrong, and the filing can be thrown out.
Who's covered. Some states extend lien rights broadly to subcontractors and material suppliers. Others require a direct contract with the property owner, which can leave subcontractors and dealers exposed if they were hired by a general contractor or installer rather than the homeowner directly.
Enforcement timelines. Filing the lien isn't the end of the process — most states require you to actually file a lawsuit to foreclose on the lien within a set window (often 6-12 months) or the lien expires and becomes worthless.
Bond claims vs. property liens. On public projects, mechanics liens generally don't apply at all — you're dealing with payment bond claims instead, which have their own separate notice and filing rules.

Why this matters so much in solar specifically: Solar dealers and installers often operate across multiple states, sometimes under a parent company's brand while running the actual contract and installation work through a local entity. That means the same company can be simultaneously navigating a strict 60-day preliminary notice state, a 90-day filing state with no preliminary notice requirement, and a state where liens don't attach at all without direct privity with the homeowner — all at once, on projects running in parallel.

What happens when you get it wrong. I've seen contractors lose five- and six-figure claims not because the underlying debt wasn't real or the work wasn't done, but because a preliminary notice went out three days late, or a filing was submitted in the wrong county, or nobody realized the foreclosure deadline had already passed. Courts are largely unsympathetic here — mechanics lien statutes are interpreted strictly, and "we didn't know the deadline" is not a defense.

This becomes especially critical when the party who owes you money goes bankrupt. In a bankruptcy proceeding, whether you hold a properly perfected lien is often the single biggest factor in whether you get paid at all, or end up as an unsecured creditor waiting in line behind everyone else. A lien filed one day late, in the wrong form, or without the required prior notice can be worthless in exactly the moment you need it most.

The takeaway: If your business does work in more than one state — or even just one state you're not deeply familiar with — don't assume your standard process works everywhere. Know the specific notice deadlines, filing windows, and enforcement requirements for every state you operate in, before you need to use them. By the time you're trying to figure this out during a payment dispute or a customer's bankruptcy, it's usually too late to fix a missed deadline.

Want to talk through your state's lien requirements or your current exposure? Reach out.

"Sunnova, Mosaic, and PosiGen — three solar giants collapsed within months. What their bankruptcies reveal about the industry's model."

In less than six months, three of the residential solar industry's biggest names collapsed. Solar Mosaic, one of the industry's largest solar loan providers with over $15 billion in loans funded, filed Chapter 11 on June 6, 2025. Two days later, Sunnova — the second-largest third-party-owned solar installer in the country, backed by a $3 billion DOE loan guarantee — filed its own Chapter 11. Then PosiGen followed in November 2025.

Different companies, different business models, same ending: bankruptcy court, asset sales, and hundreds of dealers and installers left scrambling to get paid for work they'd already completed.

That's not a coincidence. It's a business model problem.

Two June filings, 48 hours apart, tell the real story. Mosaic wasn't an installer — it was the financing layer, backing home solar loans for over 500,000 households. Sunnova was the installer and lessor. Together, they represented both major ways homeowners paid for solar: loans and leases/PPAs. When the lender and one of the largest lessors both hit bankruptcy court in the same week, it wasn't a company-specific failure. It was the financing model underneath the entire industry breaking at the same time.

The model that built the industry is the same one that's breaking it.

Third-party-ownership (TPO) — leases and power purchase agreements that let homeowners go solar with little or no money down — along with solar loans like Mosaic's, is what made residential solar scale over the last decade. It works by having the installer, lessor, or lender carry the cost of the system upfront, then collect payments over 20-25 years as the homeowner "pays for" the energy produced.

That model runs entirely on cheap capital. As long as interest rates stay low and investors keep funding the paper, the math works. The moment borrowing costs spike, the model gets squeezed from both directions: financing new systems gets more expensive, and the long-dated receivables on the books are worth less to lenders and investors evaluating the company's balance sheet. Mosaic cited exactly this — rising rates, a fragmented capital market, and legislative uncertainty around solar tax credits — as the reason it couldn't raise the capital it needed, despite bringing in outside advisors more than a year before its filing.

Add policy risk on top of that. Sunnova had already built its business partly around a federal loan guarantee — the single largest DOE commitment ever made to solar — before that guarantee was pulled by a change in administration. California's net metering changes (NEM 3.0) gutted the economics of new installs in one of the largest solar markets in the country. Legislation rolling back residential solar tax credits (48E and 25D) added yet another layer of uncertainty right as both companies were trying to raise capital. When your revenue model depends on cheap capital and a stable policy environment, you're exposed on two fronts at once, and 2024-2025 hit both simultaneously.

The dealer and installer network absorbs the shock first. Sunnova and PosiGen didn't manufacture panels or do all the installs themselves — they worked through networks of independent dealer-installers who signed homeowners, did the physical work, and got paid by the installer/financier after the fact. When the installer runs out of cash, dealers are the ones holding unpaid invoices for completed jobs, with little leverage and often no idea their exposure is coming until the bankruptcy filing hits the news.

I've watched this play out from the dealer side, more than once. The pattern is always the same: warning signs show up in SEC filings and executive departures months before anyone in the field hears about it, then it's mass layoffs, then the Chapter 11 filing, then a fire-sale of assets to a bondholder- or lender-backed buyer for a fraction of what the company was worth a year earlier. Sunnova's assets sold for about $118 million against $13.4 billion in reported assets the year before. Mosaic's $8 billion loan portfolio ended up serviced by a subsidiary of its own secured lender. That's the gap between a going concern and a wind-down.

What this means if you're a dealer, installer, or anyone extending credit in this space:

Don't treat "second-largest in the industry" as a proxy for financial stability — size didn't save Sunnova, and scale didn't save Mosaic.
Watch the leading indicators: going-concern warnings, executive resignations, workforce reductions, outside restructuring advisors. They show up before the filing, not after.
Understand your legal position before you need it. Liens, UCC filings, and proof-of-claim procedures aren't paperwork you deal with after a bankruptcy — they're protection you should already have in place.

The solar industry isn't going away. But the TPO-heavy, loan-heavy, cheap-capital growth model that built the last decade is running into a rate and policy environment it wasn't built for. When your lender and your lessor file bankruptcy in the same week, that's not bad luck — that's a business model reaching the end of what cheap money could paper over. More consolidation and more bankruptcies are a reasonable bet — not because solar doesn't work, but because too many of these companies were financed like it was still 2021.

Been affected by one of these bankruptcies, or want to talk through how to protect your position? Reach out.

When the Bankruptcy Hits: A Dealer's Playbook for Surviving a Solar Installer's Collapse

When Sunnova filed Chapter 11 in June 2025, it wasn't just an installer going down — it dragged hundreds of independent solar dealers into the mess with it. These are the small businesses that actually sell and install the systems, working under contract with the big installer. When the installer goes bankrupt, the dealer is often left holding unpaid invoices for completed work, with zero leverage in a bankruptcy court that has bigger fish — bondholders, secured lenders — ahead of them in line.

I worked directly with a solar dealer caught in exactly this position. At the time Sunnova filed, this dealer had over a dozen systems in progress representing nearly half a million dollars in contract value. That money was now tied up in one of the largest solar bankruptcies in U.S. history — a company with $10 billion to $50 billion in liabilities.

Most dealers in this spot do nothing. They file a claim, get told they're an unsecured creditor, and wait months (or years) to find out they'll recover pennies on the dollar — if anything.

We didn't wait. Instead of standing in line, we moved to secure the dealer's position directly:

Filed mechanics liens on the properties where systems were installed but not yet paid for
Filed UCC financing statements to establish a secured interest in the receivables tied to those contracts
Filed a formal proof of claim in the bankruptcy case backed by that secured position — rather than an unsecured one

The difference matters enormously in bankruptcy. Unsecured creditors get whatever's left after everyone else is paid — often nothing. Secured creditors, and dealers who've properly perfected liens on the underlying property, have a real claim that has to be dealt with before general unsecured debt gets a dime.

The result: the dealer recovered a negotiated settlement tied to the completed systems — money that likely would have been lost entirely in the general unsecured creditor pool.

The takeaway for anyone in this industry: if you're a dealer, contractor, or subcontractor working under a larger company, don't assume your invoice is safe just because the work is done and the contract is signed. When your customer's customer — the installer, the financier — goes bankrupt, your paperwork and your filing timeline become the entire ballgame. Liens and UCC filings aren't just legal formalities; they're the difference between getting paid and getting in line behind everyone else.

If you're in a trade where you extend credit or do work before getting paid — solar, electrical, construction — it's worth understanding this playbook before you need it, not after.

Been through something similar, or want to talk through your own exposure? Reach out — I'm happy to walk through what worked here.