Ian D

I build AI systems that run in production, and I coach from inside them. What I've built: I design and operate agentic pipelines in daily use — scheduled agents that detect new reporting, stage collection runs, and produce structured triage boards a human reviews and decides on. I'm in these every day, not advising on them from the outside. I built the governance framework first and the workflows on top of it: policies for safe, ethical, and transparent use, data handling, and output quality control. Turnaround on recurring deliverables dropped by more than 60% while holding human-verified quality standards. I lead hands-on AI implementation for a consumer-products company — tools their staff use immediately, and training that gets non-technical people applying AI to their own business problems. For another client I ran an AI maturity assessment and a phased adoption roadmap, and escalated vendor-support gaps directly to the owner to control cost and improve performance. Why governance first, and why it isn't paperwork: At a government contractor I integrated CMMI, CMMC, and insider risk into a single governance system rather than running them as parallel tracks. I structured CMMC execution to simultaneously demonstrate the process maturity CMMI required, using one program's discipline as evidence for another's. CMMI Level 2 to Level 3 and full CMMC implementation both completed in under a year. That's the same move that separates an AI deployment surviving contact with a real organization from a pilot that quietly dies. What I check before I automate anything: whether the work traces back to a goal. Automation is faithful — it reproduces whatever it's pointed at, gaps included — so I confirm the process is connected to an outcome before I make it faster. That's why the automation holds afterward. I coach at three altitudes, because the same problem looks different at each: Individual contributor under pressure to produce with AI and unsure how. Team manager who has to coordinate people, standards, and output quality across a team using it. Senior leader accountable for adoption, governance, risk, spend, and whether any of it connects to organizational goals. I've sat in all three seats, in government and in the private sector. If you operate in a regulated, governed, or public-sector environment, that isn't background — it's why my recommendations survive your compliance review. PMP · A-CSM · CSPO · Atlassian Certified