"I started an AI company focused on higher education"

OK, so I didn’t enter this program to build an AI company. I entered it trying to understand a tool. What I found was something completely different.

At first, I was like most people I think, curious, slightly skeptical, a little anxious maybe, definitely overwhelmed and aware that AI mattered, but still relating to it like something outside of me.

A tool. A system. Something to learn… eventually.

But as I moved through the program, something clicked. AI isn’t just a tool. It’s an environment.

And if you don’t learn how to live inside it consciously, you will default inside it unconsciously.

That distinction changed everything for me. With 37 years in higher education, I could immediately see the gap — not just in technology, but in how humans relate to it.

So I stopped consuming AI and started collaborating with it.

That shift didn’t just increase my productivity. It expanded what I could create. Including something I didn’t expect:

I started an AI company focused on higher education — bridging the space between fear and fluency for thought leaders, educators and institutions.

But more than that, AI became part of how I design my life. How I think. How I build. How I move. how I interact with the world.

Not as a replacement for intelligence (I'm an academic after all and crushed that myth long ago) but as an amplifier of it.

And when used that way? It doesn’t just change your work. It changes what you believe is possible. AI Mastery wasn't just a space to learn, it provided the key to unlock gifts of mine I can now use in service to others and the world.