to use AI to build a mathematical optimization model for a real business problem, you’ve probably run into the same wall: the AI works beautifully on textbook examples and falls apart the moment you hand it your actual data and your actual problem. That gap isn’t a coincidence. It’s by design, and it’s the reason why I built ORPilot. The Promise of AI-Powered Optimization Operations Research (OR) has been quietly powering some of the most impactful decisions in business for decades — routing delivery trucks, scheduling factory production, designing supply chains, allocating cargo to carriers. The math is mature and the solvers are excellent. The bottleneck has always been the human expertise required to translate a business problem into a mathematical model. Large Language Models (LLMs) seemed like the perfect solution.…