I build toward a thesis. In a published 2018 interview I said that AI and machine learning would become the focal point of our products, and that all the AI in the world cannot recreate a human connection. Both positions read as industry consensus today; in 2018 they were commitments. The same habit, matured, produced the frameworks: the Conduit Constraint on why enterprise AI value stalls at the organizational conduit, Knowledge-Driven Design on measuring knowledge transfer as a flow system, and a four-tier model for where AI value accrues in an enterprise.
The building has run at every scale, inside enterprises and outside them: a new Taylor Corporation division grown from inception to $25M in under two years; the enterprise distribution platform serving 17,500 agents at State Farm; DaRK Capital, a holding company founded and grown into an insurtech, fintech, and ICT portfolio, its companies including a Top 25 Insurtech and OmniPark, a national parking-solutions provider later acquired by FLASH; the founding build of GM's insurance re-entry; and Hagerty's applied AI estate, built from zero with formal evaluation gates. The pattern is constant: find the unmet need, assemble the team, build the system, make it pay.
The operating record grounds it. At Hagerty I lead the global technology organization and the enterprise operating model. The disciplines beneath that work, Theory of Constraints, Lean, and total quality, were learned physically on manufacturing plant floors. The teams are the proof that compounds: people I developed now lead technology organizations of their own. And the point of the whole estate is the customer: an ecosystem built so that people feel known, which is where the four-tier model of AI value deliberately terminates. Alongside all of it: doctoral research in knowledge transfer sustainability at Oklahoma State University, the MIT CTO Program (in progress), trusteeship of Eureka College, and donated reading and knowledge-practice programs for community libraries, because the same discipline that moves an enterprise works with paper and thread.
Most firms report no measurable impact from AI while most firms use it. The binding constraint is organizational: knowledge transfer bandwidth, the conduit between what the organization knows and what its AI systems can act on. The conduit is designed, and designing it is leadership work.
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