The doors opened sideways.
I did not set out with a plan to become an enterprise architect, build education data systems, or spend a career thinking about how public institutions should use artificial intelligence. I kept encountering unlikely questions, saying yes, and learning what the next room required.
A biology major who became a youth pastor.
For ten years I worked as a full-time youth minister. I loved helping teenagers move through one of the most complicated passages of life. The work taught me to listen for what people meant, not merely what they said, to translate difficult things into plain language, and to stay present when a situation was messy.
Underneath it, I wanted to be a technology consultant. I had no degree pointing there, no plan for becoming one, and no good reason to believe the door was available to me.
Then my father handed me a machine that changed the direction of my life.
An IBM PS/2 and six months of unreasonable curiosity.
My father was a high school dropout, a lifelong entrepreneur, and fascinated by every gadget that came along. When he upgraded his computer, he gave me the old IBM PS/2. The first time I sat in front of it, something clicked.
That Christmas he gave me IBM OS/2 Warp. I spent six months learning it for no practical reason. I learned it because I loved it.
“Do you know anyone with OS/2 experience?”
A friend called the church office and asked the question. He did not expect me to know what OS/2 was. I did. Eddie and Robert, the business division CIO, interviewed me the next day and hired me into the Marketing Information Systems lab at BellSouth Small Business. The analytics tool the engineers used ran only on OS/2.
Life has a patient sense of humor. Sometimes it hands you the thesis of your story decades early, disguised as a support ticket.
From fixing systems to drawing what came next.
I started on the help desk, then began designing solutions instead of repairing them, then moved into the architecture underneath. Build the help desk. Roll out TCP/IP. Put a browser on every desk. Build an intranet before most of us could define the word.
The World Wide Web arrived before I had properly unpacked. I was installing Mosaic on corporate machines and watching the first of five technology waves move through organizations.
The Web
The largest change, and the one that taught me technology can win while businesses built around it still lose.
Collaboration
We put everyone in the same digital room. Some work improved. We also invented reply-all.
Knowledge
Experts retired anyway. The durable lesson was that most organizational knowledge is not written down.
Business intelligence
Data warehouses and analytics permanently changed how large organizations decide.
Artificial intelligence
The current wave. The task is to find what will remain after the press releases fade.
Enterprise capability had one problem. Schools could not afford it.
The tools I saw inside a Fortune 500 telecommunications company were powerful, expensive, and beyond the staffing and budgets of most education agencies. The gap was not primarily technical. It was a budget and capacity gap wearing a technology costume.
In 2001, I used the phrase Education Intelligence to describe the work I wanted to do: bring data warehousing, reporting, forecasting, analysis, and eventually artificial intelligence to the people and agencies serving children.
I helped bootstrap an education technology company around that idea. Since then, I have worked from the vendor side, the agency side, and the consulting side. The thread has remained the same.
Educators should not have to fight their data in order to help their students.
Technology problems often begin as relationship problems.
Language models answer what we appear to mean, fluently and confidently, without mentioning where they guessed. The practical skill is closing the gap between what we say and what we mean, grounding the work in real sources, and checking what comes back.
My years in ministry turned out to be unusually good preparation. Good AI operation is not mainly a bag of technical tricks. It is a discipline of direction, context, judgment, trust, and accountability.
Hesitation is not resistance
Thoughtful people are right to question a system that gives confident answers and shows no work.
Expert in the loop
A named expert must be able to evaluate, overrule, and take responsibility for consequential output.
Provenance before intelligence
An institution cannot defend an answer if it cannot explain the sources behind it.
Capability that fits
A child’s opportunity should not depend on whether the local agency can afford an enterprise technology team.
I call it my Artificial Intern.
That is not a joke about capability. It describes the working relationship. The AI is fast, tireless, occasionally brilliant, and extremely confident about things it should not be confident about. It does excellent work when someone competent explains what is needed and checks the result.
You would not hand a bright intern an ambiguous assignment and publish the output unread. Same rule.
Most programs optimize for the sophisticated user. I care about the analyst reconciling a report, the program staffer answering the same question for the ninetieth time, and the education professional losing hours to fragmented systems. That is where practical capacity can be returned.
The work is still translation.
I lead Education Intelligence work focused on data governance, analytics, interoperability, modernization, and applied AI for public education. [VERIFY CURRENT]
I remain happily employed and open to speaking with education leaders, technologists, and professional communities working through what this wave means.
Outside the work, I am a husband, father, grandfather, guitar player, and reader of history, theology, and philosophy. Those systems matter too.
Start a conversationViews expressed here are my own.