I build AI to keep people capable. And I write about the boring truth behind it: people don’t get better from a clever hack or a personality quiz. They get better by doing the real thing, badly, until they don’t. That’s called practice. It’s unsexy, which is exactly why an entire industry sells you everything except it.
I spent five years in a lab studying how the brain works: how networks of neurons coordinate, recorded non-invasively, with machine learning pulling the patterns out of very noisy signals. That’s where the AI half of my career actually started, on brain data, years before I built it into companies. Then I spent twelve years building AI in the real world. I co-founded RoadBotics, an AI company for infrastructure, and sold it to Michelin in 2022.
The thread through all of it: technology should make people harder to replace, not easier. Eventually I gave that idea a name. Human Acceleration: you aim AI at people to make them faster than the change bearing down on them, instead of aiming it at people to replace them. Not doom. Not acceleration for its own sake. A third position, where the human is the point. (Written hacc when it’s in a hurry. Yes, it reads like “hack.”)
That’s the work now: making the case, and building the tools, for pointing this technology at people instead of around them. Most of what I write starts from the thing that quietly wrecks teams in the meantime. Capability debt: the gap between what your people can do and what the work now demands. Like any debt, it compounds. You pay it down the boring way, with small regular reps, or you keep paying the interest in rework and in good people quietly drowning. Human Acceleration is just what it looks like when you decide to pay it down on purpose, at the speed the moment actually requires.
I’m allergic to training snake-oil, and I got sold plenty of it myself. So mostly I write to hand you the questions that catch a magic pitch before it catches you. No magic. Just practice, made a lot less boring to do.
The short version
#- PhD, Bioengineering (University of Pittsburgh) · studied how brain networks communicate, with machine learning on neural activity.
- kWantera · Data Scientist to CTO. Shipped real ML into energy markets back when “ML in production” was still a novelty.
- RoadBotics · Co-Founder & CEO. Computer vision for infrastructure. WEF Technology Pioneer. Acquired by Michelin in 2022.
- Michelin Mobility Intelligence · CTO. Led the integration across US and France teams.
- HeyLoopy · Founder & CEO. Turning the training docs nobody reads into daily practice that sticks.
Before you go
#This is where I think out loud. If it’s useful, the best place to keep up is LinkedIn, where I post most days: follow along here.
If your team is paying down capability debt the hard way, that’s the problem I build for at HeyLoopy. No hard sell. This is the way; it always has been. I’ll be here.