Thought Leadership
AI, Identity & Strategy
I write from lived experience in strategy, identity, and AI. Generative AI helps refine clarity and validate data , but the voice and perspective are entirely my own.
When “AI Employees” Call Humans The Constraint: Why Podium’s Jerry 2.0 Feels So Gross
There is a special kind of nausea that hits when a founder calls people “the biggest constraint” and their new AI “the employee.” Podium’s Jerry 2.0 is sold as 24/7 help for local businesses, but the real pitch is simple: more revenue with fewer humans. This piece pulls apart why that story feels so slick, so scummy and what it reveals about how tech leaders really see the rest of us.
The Human Harm Layer: When Organizational AI Turns Outward to The Shopper
Retail AI does not begin at the edge of the app. It begins inside the organization, in the way leaders treat employees who raise concerns about harm.
The Human Harm Layer is the mechanism that carries those internal habits into external decisions about customers. When a worker is told to “go into listen mode” after naming how a pricing model will make life more expensive for poor Black neighborhoods, that is not just a bad meeting. It is Emotional Metadata the system chooses to ignore.
The same logic shows up later in delivery platforms and dynamic pricing schemes that quietly charge the highest tax on convenience to the people with the least slack. This essay maps how that harm travels, how it becomes code and what it will take for retailers to stop exporting workplace violence into customer experience.
A System Built on Silence: Part Five- The Psychology of Harm
When the noise finally stopped, the pattern came into focus. The employee had not failed to “handle stress.” They had been shaped by a system that rewarded harm, normalized confusion, and relied on their silence. Part Five dissects the archetypes that uphold that system and reveals the psychology beneath the collapse.
A System Built on Silence: Part Four- When Workplace Chaos Turns Into Physiological Collapse
This installment examines what happens when a workplace treats a person as toggleable in its systems. The body does not forget the instability. It records it. Part Four traces how hypervigilance, panic, and exhaustion emerge not from weakness, but from prolonged exposure to organizational harm.
A System Built on Silence: Part Three - The Moment They Spoke Truth
The most devastating harm in a workplace rarely arrives through shouting. It arrives through silence. Part Two examines the manager who held authority without responsibility, and how their refusal to claim the employee became its own form of injury — one that eroded confidence, blurred accountability, and revealed the deeper architecture of an unstable system.
A System Built on Silence: Part Two - The Manager Who Did Not Claim Them
When a manager refuses to claim responsibility, the harm doesn’t come through conflict. It comes through absence. Part Two exposes how avoidance, scattered feedback, and hidden workload ethics quietly dismantle a person’s stability.
A System Built on Silence: Part One - The Invitation Into Harm
Part One of a six-essay series exploring how unstable workplace structures and vague leadership expectations create slow, cumulative harm. This narrative is a conceptual examination, not a depiction of real events, showing how systems can quietly erode a person’s stability long before collapse becomes visible.
Before We Build Agents, We Need to Fix the Systems That Already Cannot See Us
AI doesn’t fail queer and BIPOC people because of “bias.” It fails because it cannot interpret our identities with accuracy, context, or cultural truth. This essay reveals the mechanisms behind that harm and introduces a new architecture to prevent identity collapse in the age of autonomous AI.
The Problem Amazon Doesn’t Know It Has
Amazon doesn’t have a convenience problem.
it doesn’t have a speed problem.
It doesn’t have an assortment problem.
Amazon has a discernment problem.
Prediction Isn’t Perception: Why Delta’s Automation Is Failing the Human Traveler
People don’t remember flawless. They remember feeling seen.
They remember the human who made the stress smaller, the journey lighter, the moment calmer. They remember the person who didn’t just process them, but acknowledged them.
Travel, at its core, is a human ritual. It is migration, reunion, escape, reinvention, obligation, hope. And any airline that forgets that truth — even unintentionally — begins to lose the one thing technology can’t replicate: emotional resonance.