There's a specific kind of work I'm drawn to.
It's the moment when a business realizes their tools aren't keeping up with how they actually operate. The people are good and the intentions are solid, but the software they're paying for was designed for someone else's workflow.
What I’ve Learned
I’ve spent my career in industries where the work isn’t glamorous: telecommunications, workforce management, distribution. Places where software enables the service, and the real work happens away from a screen. Places where you can’t just move fast and break things because real operations depend on what you build.
At Charter/Spectrum, I spent a decade building the digital platforms that connected business operations to customer experience. The biggest challenge was always the same: 40+ disconnected systems, each making smart decisions with partial information, none of them talking to each other. The solution was always the same too. Build the context layer that connects them.
That’s context engineering. I didn’t have a name for it then. I just knew that the integration layer, the thing that tells every system who this customer is and what they need, was where the real value lived.
Why This Work
AI changed the economics. The same approach I used at enterprise scale (unifying systems around shared context, making implicit business logic explicit, building the integration infrastructure) is now viable for a ten-person service business. The tools are free. The AI is built. What’s missing is someone who knows how to translate the context and wire it all together.
That’s what Human Context does. The name is the job: I translate the human context about your business (your knowledge, your processes, your relationships, the way you make decisions) into a form your AI can work with. The technology is the easy part. Understanding how a business runs and why it runs that way is where the real work lives.
What I’ve learned doing this work is that the AI partnership is instrumental, not the destination. The point isn’t to automate your business. The point is to give you and your team the space to do the work that actually needs human judgment, human relationships, human creativity. Working with AI turns out to be a soft skill, not a hard skill. It’s about bringing your own humanity, choices, and boundaries to how you engage with these tools, in service of the human-to-human relationships that make your business what it is.
I also work as a strategic advisor for mid-market companies building operating models around AI. That’s where the approach was born, and it’s still where some of the most interesting problems live.
How I Work
I take on work where context engineering creates the most impact. For small businesses, that’s usually a website migration that demonstrates the model, then expanding into workflow automation and system integration as it makes sense. For mid-market companies, it’s diagnostic work when teams feel stuck, or fractional partnerships when they need someone who’s done this before.
Every engagement delivers something you own. I’m not building a dependency. I’m building capability and handing it over.
The Writing
I write about the intersection of technology, operations, and the humans caught in between at inspirednonsense.com. It’s where I think out loud about where this is all going.
Let’s Talk
If your business is hitting expertise bottlenecks, if your tools don’t know what your team knows, or if you’re trying to figure out how AI fits into the way you work, I’d be glad to have that conversation.
The first step is a conversation.
Book a 30-minute call. No pitch. Bring a system that's messy, a workflow that's eating your time, or a question that won't go away.
Book a 30-minute intro call