About Your Guide

ChatGPT made its debut at the end of 2022. I went in early and never came out.

Back in 2021, during the COVID lockdown, I finally wrote the book I'd been meaning to write for years — Embracing Change. It took me about 1,200 hours.

When AI showed up, I decided to write another one — Voices of Happiness, which came out of a lifelong habit of collecting quotes. Not to have AI write it for me. To write it with me.

Ten times faster.

And there wasn't a single typo in it.

That was the moment. I'd gotten the time back, and I could feel it.

After that I went in headfirst — certifications in AI strategy, data science, implementation, consulting. Not because I needed the paper, but because I wanted to actually know what I was talking about before I taught anybody anything. Which is when it clicked that the teaching was the thing I actually wanted to do.

Ever since, I can't imagine working any other way. Mostly I just wish I'd had AI back when I was running my other companies. I might have made it home for dinner with my kids a lot more often.

Here's what bothered me. The people with the most experience — the most judgment, the most actual wisdom about how the world works — are the ones the tech industry serves worst. They get talked down to, or talked past, or handed a manual written for somebody else.

That's not okay. And it's backwards, because experience is exactly what makes someone good at this. AI brings speed and reach. You bring judgment about what actually matters. That combination is genuinely powerful — and nobody was teaching it.

So I built the class I wished someone had handed me back at the start.

Here's the odd part. I built a course and then wrote myself out of it.

I taught the early versions in person, and they went well. But a filmmaker's instinct kept nagging at me: the thing people actually needed to see wasn't me explaining AI. It was what a real partnership between a person and an AI looks like from the inside. You can describe that all day and it doesn't land. You have to watch it.

So I created two characters — using AI. Katya is the human side of the screen — she went first, and she teaches. AI is… AI. That's his name, and it's also the lesson: he's warm, funny, honest about his own limits, and after five minutes with him most people stop being nervous.

I've come to love them both — and so have a lot of other people — which I did not expect to happen.

They do the teaching now. I just built the room.