Skip to content

Article

Working together directly

For many organizations, a portfolio synthesis across roughly 180 grantee narrative reports is a two-week analyst project. With the right intelligence-age system embedded in your workflow, the same work happens in an afternoon. The analyst reads, validates, and edits the synthesis instead of producing it from scratch. The data stays inside your systems. The principal sees a portfolio-level view that did not exist before. Intelligence becomes something you can call on demand because the surrounding system is built for it.

Or take a mission-aligned private company sitting on internal data: partner submissions, customer signal, supplier provenance, frontline observations, operational records. The work is not just to summarize it. The work is to turn it into a living operational view, with intelligent tools close enough to the workflow that the organization can actually use what it knows.

I do this kind of work directly with foundations and the organizations they fund, with NGOs of any size, and with mission-aligned private companies whose work has a public-benefit dimension. What I build for you does its work inside your environment. The point is not to replace the people already doing the work. It is to make them more capable, more focused, and less trapped inside the assembly cost around the work.

On the leverage itself

The conversation around tools like these often lands in the wrong frame. In commercial software, the typical story is labor substitution: fewer hours per output, profit lifted, headcount under pressure. That is not the frame I am most interested in.

In the work you do, the unit of value is not only efficiency. It is judgment, coordination, impact, and the ability to see clearly enough to act. The analyst still reads the synthesis. She just stops producing every first draft from scratch. The principal still decides. They just see a portfolio-level view that is more data rich and tailored to them. The work is not replaced. It is lifted.

For example, what looks like operational overhead inside a mission-driven team can be the assembly cost of getting reality into a form the team can deliberate over: board prep, grantee report digestion, monthly reporting, compliance reconciliation, internal research, partner updates. Removing that cost is not just an efficiency story. It is a return of the hours the team was hired to spend on the work itself.

On what compounds

The shift these tools enable inside an organization is an accrual. The patterns your team builds by working alongside these systems. The internal data the team can finally ask questions of. The muscle memory of judgment running next to structured tools. None of that exists at the start; all of it is real by month six, and compounding by the second serious piece of work.

The time value of intelligence. The capacity an institution claims by working with these tools early accrues at a compounding rate, the same way capital deployed early earns more than capital deployed later. That is the mechanism beneath the asymmetry, and it is why the conversation about whether to start now matters more than the conversation about which tool to start with. The compounding of collective human intelligence over time is the fundamental concept that I believe has led us to modern society. What's happening now is an acceleration and extension of that, and it can be engineered.

The time value of intelligence.A chart with time on the horizontal axis. Two curves rise from a shared starting point on the lower-left. A slate- blue curve labeled frontier capability rises smoothly toward the upper-right, representing the underlying frontier compounding for everyone who arrives. A terracotta curve labeled deployed frontier systems rises substantially faster, representing what early systematic deployment accrues. The widening space between them is tinted gold: the time value of intelligence.deployed frontier systemsfrontier capabilityOVER 12 MONTHS →
Frontier capability is now doubling roughly every three months. A year ago these systems handled half-hour tasks; today they handle twelve-hour ones. The frontier systems you deploy early compound substantially faster than that ambient rise. The space between is the time value of intelligence.Curves modeled by the Arcede Time-Value Model v0.2. The frontier-doubling rate is calibrated against METR Time Horizon 1.1 (May 2026), Epoch AI capability progress data, and the Stanford AI Index 2026. Institutional-leverage parameters and the deployment-success probability are operational defaults; calibration data accumulates per engagement. The faint terracotta and slate bands around the two central curves are 80% confidence intervals from 200 Monte Carlo samples perturbing all parameters.

What it usually looks like

We can start with something simple: a focused deliverable, an overview of AI, or a hands-on workshop with your team, or a small system built around one workflow that matters.

From there, we'll scope one concrete piece of work: portfolio synthesis, internal research, operational reporting, customer or partner data infrastructure, board or investor preparation, workflow redesign, or something adjacent. The shape varies. The places where your team is already spending too much time are usually the right starting points.

What you end up with is a working system, delivered inside your own environment. It should remain readable and governable to you. The point is not a mysterious black box. The point is a system your team can understand, trust, and use.

What looks like a single project at the start often opens into something longer, because the same patterns surface elsewhere in your operations. Once one part of the organization learns how to work with intelligence on demand this way, the next useful place tends to become obvious.

What I'm working on now

The conversations I am having now are with foundations, NGOs, and mission-aligned public-sector and private-sector organizations. They often begin with a simple question about intelligent tools: what is real, what is useful, what is safe to bring into their work. Then they open into the deeper question, which is how this capability should actually land inside the organization's operating reality.

That is the part I am most interested in. Not tool demos in the abstract. The translation from frontier capability into systems that fit the people, constraints, judgment, and mission already in the room to expand impact in profound ways.

Where this comes from

My background sits across organizational coordination, technical systems, and public-benefit work. I studied at the University of Georgia, with research roles at two labs, where I assisted a NASA-funded study of how leaders, teams, and interdependent organizational networks coordinate across contexts from military operations to deep-space missions. The question running through that work has stayed with me: how do groups, and groups of groups, take on challenges that exceed any single team's scope?

I took my first artificial intelligence course in 2018, before the current wave was visible to most people, and built from there through computational mathematics, programming, and systems thinking. At the time, this was the only AI course on offer at my R1 university.

The other thread is public-benefit work: how to make systems that hold together when conditions are difficult, and how to put real capability where it can actually be used. I have worked across global health, biodiversity conservation, educational empowerment, and capacity strengthening, including in fragile and post-conflict contexts such as eastern DRC and South Sudan. Those environments teach a certain respect for complexity. Bad systems are not abstract there. They cost time, trust, and sometimes much more.

That is the through-line for me. As the technologies of the intelligence age accelerate, leverage will concentrate by default. A small number of people and organizations will understand how to use these systems well, and many others will be left waiting for tools that do not fit their reality. Part of my mission is to disperse that leverage in pragmatic ways, with partners who are trying to do consequential work.