About

I help organizations work out what to do about AI. I don’t do this by explaining it, exactly, but by putting people in a position to make their own judgments about it. Most of what stalls adoption isn't technical. It's that people are uncertain whether their experience still counts for anything, and no amount of tool training fixes that.

I came to this sideways. I spent my twenties in Aichi, Japan, doing cross-cultural training for Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Denso — mostly preparing people to work in places where their usual instincts wouldn't serve them. That turned out to be the whole job, in every job since.

Then eleven years at the Banff Centre designing and delivering over a hundred leadership and innovation programs for energy companies, insurers, provincial governments, and technology firms. Then Artscape Daniels Launchpad, where I built the curriculum for a new entrepreneurship facility. In 2017 I founded UKAI Projects, and in 2019 I started spending most of my time with artists, policymakers, and data scientists who were excited about AI and worried about where it was heading. I've been working on that question ever since. I’ve been fortunate to work nationally, through consultations and training programs, and hands-on, building systems with generative models.

We are going through a period of profound volatility. The ground under our feet seems to be constantly moving and our maps are no longer reliable. Uncertainty makes issues more and more polarized. There are many who offer us new maps of this changed world, but I believe we need to spend more time on the terrain if we want to make good decisions about what happens next. Simple answers to complex questions often cause more trouble down the line. So, in my work, I try to provide people with real encounters of these changes so they can make up their own mind and be confident moving forward.

Most recently I was Executive Director of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. I now run my practice through In the Meantime. I live in Toronto with my wife and daughter.