I am a Lead Data Architect at General Mills. I have spent years making AI and data tools work inside a large, complex organization. What I learned there is simple: the tools are not the problem. People do not know which one to reach for. And they are not clear enough about what they are trying to build.
AI feels like the internet did in the late nineties — a once-in-a-generation shift where most people are not sure where they fit in what is coming. Some think it will take everything. Others think it is overhyped. Most are somewhere in the middle: curious, a little overwhelmed, not sure how to start. I built my work for those people.
Outside of work, I build for real clients. A real estate investor writing letters of intent manually for every deal now generates them in under two minutes. A marriage counselor without a development budget built her entire practice website without a developer and owns it outright. I build for myself too: a personal operating system that remembers my financial goals, training protocol, and the decisions I have already made, so I can show up and work without re-explaining my life. I have tried most of the tools that exist, not to collect them, but to understand what each one is actually designed to do. That is the work that makes me a useful guide, not a theorist.
Before General Mills, I spent two years as a Young Adult Pastor: preaching, teaching, and leading discussions with people at very different starting points. That is where I learned how to hold a room.