I'm not an AI researcher. I'm an operator who builds.

For more than twenty years my job has been making complicated things happen in the real world: events, venues, retail programs, field teams, tight timelines and people who need a straight answer right now. Most recently that included venue operations work supporting FIFA World Cup 2026 in Philadelphia.

Somewhere in there I started building. Agents, automations, internal tools, and then actual products — Reactor, BrAIn OS, Douglass, InterviewAlly, Escapade. Not because I wanted to be in AI, but because there were problems in front of me and the tools finally got good enough to solve them.

That's the whole difference in how I teach this. I'm not doing AI for AI's sake. I'm doing it to get something done, to stay relevant, to build the thing I've been carrying around for years. Most people I talk to are in exactly the same position — they already know how to do something valuable, and they want to know what this changes for them.

I've keynoted an AI workshop hosted at PhillyCAM, run rooms full of people who had never opened an AI tool, and explained agents to friends who assumed the whole thing was hype. My credentials are what I've actually built and the work I've actually done.