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.
Same Cart, Different Power: What Instacart’s AI Pricing Experiments Really Tell Us
Instacart calls it experimentation. Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative call it what it is: an AI pricing system that quietly tests how far it can push your grocery bill. This essay connects their findings to food deserts, price elasticity, and racialized access, and lays out the guardrails any serious retailer or regulator should demand before turning AI loose on the cost of eating.
When Border Bias Becomes Training Data: Why AI Poses New Risks for Racialized Travelers
At the Canadian border, an officer asked what I thought about AI. When I told him its darkest risk is erasure, he brought up something most people avoid. New hires sometimes rely on instinct more than training, and their decisions shape who gets searched or stopped. If AI learns from those patterns, the bias becomes logic. This piece explores how border automation can harden inequities that already exist, and why systems must be designed to truly see the people they serve.
When Answer Synthesis Replaces Search, Visibility Becomes the First Casualty
Answer synthesis is positioned as the future of search, but most AI systems cannot see underrepresented communities clearly enough to summarize them. When a model replaces exploration with a single synthesized answer, nuance disappears and minority perspectives fall out of view. This piece examines how visibility collapses inside synthesis systems and what must change before this shift becomes the default.
Synthetic Consumers Will Rewire Product Development. But Only If They Can See Us.
Synthetic personas are about to change how companies test ideas, but the systems generating them still misread or erase LGBTQ and BIPOC consumers. When AI personas replace real users without identity-aware data, emotional metadata, and lived-experience signals, synthetic research becomes a closed loop built on omission. This piece lays out the risks, the systemic blind spots, and the strategic path toward synthetic consumers that reflect the real world instead of flattening it.
A Retail Lens on Design Sprint Academy’s AI Framework
Design Sprint Academy delivered one of the clearest AI frameworks I’ve seen. Their focus on structured decision making, guided facilitation, and rapid learning is powerful. Through a retail lens, the work becomes even more interesting. Retail has two customers, deep emotional dynamics, and identity shaped behaviors that must be understood from the first conversation. The result is a richer, more human way of framing AI value. Here is what I learned and how the framework expands inside a sector that never stops moving.
Becoming Me: A Reintroduction
There are moments when your voice becomes impossible to ignore. This is the story of how pressure clarified my purpose, sharpened my leadership, and revealed the future I am built to lead in.
Role Design in the Age of AI
The modern workplace now moves at a velocity the human brain was never designed to sustain. Workloads accelerate. Expectations multiply.
Communication channels expand. And somewhere in all that speed, something quietly vanishes: Clarity.
Instacart Was Supposed to Die the Day Amazon Bought Whole Foods
When Amazon bought Whole Foods, everyone predicted Instacart’s collapse. Instead, the grocery industry spent years chasing the wrong infrastructure—and is now retreating from automation, robotics, and self-distribution. Instacart’s flexible, store-proximate model didn’t just survive; it became the design pattern grocers are returning to.