Jakub Lohniský used AI to rebuild his whole Prague company cheaply

Jakub Lohniský, founder of the Prague bespoke-tailoring company Le Premier, has spent recent months using artificial intelligence to build himself a website, a booking system and his own ERP system for the business. The whole setup costs him about $100 a month — compared with roughly ten thousand crowns he used to spend on a patchwork of separate services.

Lohniský is a well-known figure in Prague's business community, famous for his sarcastic, critical tone on social media. Lately he has been especially vocal against people who pass themselves off as AI experts, selling courses and promising to “solve all your problems” with them. “Sometimes I tell myself: come on, this is too much! But I can't help it, I write it anyway,” the entrepreneur admits on the Money Maker podcast.

His company Le Premier was founded in 2011 and, at its peak, ran five shops in Czechia and one in Slovakia, approaching a turnover of 120 million crowns. The COVID-19 pandemic hit the business hard: shopping centres gave no concessions, and the company had to go through a restructuring. Among those who helped the firm survive was entrepreneur Tomáš Čupr, who had earlier invested tens of millions of crowns in the business. Today Le Premier has just one shop left — in the Černá růže palace on Prague's Na Příkopě street — with a turnover of about 40 million crowns and profit holding steady at six to seven million.

It was precisely this painful experience that made Lohniský a cautious entrepreneur, averse to unnecessary risk — including when it came to adopting new systems. He used to reason that even if something in the business was outdated, “this old car will still run a bit longer,” and it was too early to spend a hundred thousand crowns on an upgrade. Artificial intelligence changed that thinking completely: “Now I can have a brand-new car every week, the best one on the market. And it costs me the same as a metro pass.”

Curiously, Lohniský himself wasn't among those who immediately got excited about AI. The first chatbots struck him as a curious toy prone to hallucinating, and he was in no hurry to get swept up in them, following the trend mostly through his friend Čupr, for whom AI had become a key direction of business development. As recently as last autumn, Lohniský tried using AI to scan fabrics and cuts so he could show clients what a suit would look like — but the results were inaccurate, generation took a long time and demanded heavy resources.

The turning point was the arrival of Claude Code, a tool from the American company Anthropic capable of writing programming code from plain-text task descriptions. Since February this year, Lohniský has thrown himself fully into using AI: he dropped the Wix-built website he used to pay tens of dollars a month for and wrote his own. Next came a booking system, a working-time tracking system, service-order management, and finally his own ERP system linked to the company's accounting.

That's exactly why he's so irritated by social-media stories about astronomical token bills — tokens being the units language models are paid in. In Čupr's case, who is building his own infrastructure and rolling out AI agents across Rohlik, the entrepreneur considers such spending justified. But when weekend AI-course sellers tell “scary” stories about their bills, it triggers nothing in him but irritation.