Leave people more capable.
The team should be able to operate the system without depending on me for every request.
ABOUT DJ
The tools changed.
The reason didn’t.
I chose marketing because I believed AI would make understanding people more valuable. Then I spent my career putting that idea to work.
In 2019, a guest lecture at the University of South Florida changed how I thought about the future of work. I stayed with marketing deliberately: a bachelor’s, then a master’s, while studying AI alongside both.
Today, I work where customer understanding, operational problems, and useful technology meet. I build the system, and help the team make it theirs.
Read the full story & career record
The Bet
One guest lecture changed my career.
In an undergraduate marketing class at the University of South Florida, a guest speaker introduced us to an article about the artificial intelligence revolution. It changed how I thought about the next decade, and the career I wanted to build.
The conclusion I drew was simple enough to shape a career: as AI makes technology easier to build and customize, access to software becomes less of an advantage. Products become easier to imitate. What becomes more valuable is understanding the customer, choosing the right position, earning trust, and turning insight into action.
In other words: marketing.
So I stayed with marketing deliberately: a bachelor’s, then a master’s, while studying AI alongside both. A professor I trusted kept telling me to learn it as early as I could. It became the most valuable advice I received in school.
The article
The AI Revolution, Wait But Why. Still worth reading.
The Timeline
From early experiments to working systems.
Fall 2022
Experimenting in OpenAI’s Playground and realising how much generative AI could change marketing work.
30 Nov 2022
Started using ChatGPT on launch day and began applying it to real work immediately.
2023
Moved beyond copy into research, strategy, analysis, and reusable workflows across the first generation of widely available AI tools.
Now
Claude is my primary build environment, while the systems themselves are designed not to depend on a single model.
The Adoption
Building it is half the job.
The other half is adoption, the part many builders overlook, and the reason my systems get used rather than merely admired.
One engagement began with a reserve-study firm spending $1,000 a month on an agency. I asked what the agency was actually delivering. Two follow-up questions later, the owner had identified the real problem himself.
I lead with a working artifact before a proposal. I design the intake so a non-technical person can complete it on the first try. And I end the handoff with the system configured in the client’s own account and proven live in front of the team.
The outcome
A three-person operation now performs the function of a team of fifteen, and has already saved over a thousand dollars a month. We are still early on it.
The Turn
The breadth became the advantage.
I spent most of my career inside smaller organizations, where I had to work across email, social media, web development, design, brand strategy, positioning, and project planning. At the time, that breadth was easy to mistake for a lack of specialization.
Those environments varied as much as the work: a startup I co-founded, agency engagements, a hospital foundation accountable to donors and a board, and a private-equity-owned manufacturer accountable to shareholders. I learned AI by applying it to how companies actually operate, not by studying it in isolation. Seeing the messy parts from multiple angles taught me which patterns repeat.
As AI enables smaller teams to do more, that breadth has become an advantage. I can see the whole operation, identify the bottleneck, and build the system underneath it.
Hide In Plain Sight
The part that matters most to me.
Hide In Plain Sight helps students experiencing homelessness or instability pursue higher education. I was the second student accepted into the program and the first, with its support, to earn both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. The program has awarded more than $700,000 in scholarships and reports a 92% success rate among its recipients.
I served on the board from 2020 to 2023, helping strengthen the brand, improve digital fundraising, and tell clearer stories about student impact. In 2023, the organization invited me back as its keynote speaker. I stood in front of the same community that had once supported me and told the story of how far I had come.
HOW I THINK ABOUT THE WORK
A few things I build into every system.
Make the unknown visible.
A missing fact is something we can resolve. A plausible invention is something people may act on.
Give standards a working form.
Put the rule into the template, procedure, or validation check that the work actually passes through.
Improve the next request.
Keep the useful decisions, reusable components, and corrections so the work compounds.