Ian D

I make organizations run, remove what's stopping them, and help them tailor, govern, and use AI in their operations. What's stopping them is usually a broken link: a strategy nobody wrote down, goals never derived from it, OKRs never derived from those, or daily work nobody has checked back against any of it. Finding the broken link is most of the job. The fix is rarely more activity. It's connecting that chain end to end, then checking — week after week, not at the annual offsite — that what people actually do still traces back to what leadership decided. Different organizations, different broken links, same job. A lot of that work is now AI enabled, and should be. I design and operate agentic AI systems every day, and I built the governance for them before I built the workflows, because AI applied to a broken chain doesn't fix it. It just gets you to the wrong place faster. Governance designed in, not bolted on, is what I bring to every AI decision — mine or a client's. I can do that because I've sat at every altitude of the problem: twenty-four years, sixteen of them in the U.S. Government and eight in the private sector, from the working level to the executive seat, and as much time bringing rigor into fast organizations as bringing speed into rigorous ones. I coach the people who have to make this work inside a real organization, with or without AI — the individual under pressure to produce, the manager trying to coordinate a team, and the leader accountable for goals that have to connect to what people actually do on Tuesday. Same problem at three altitudes. I've worked all three.