Tag: university tech

Categories
AI Solutions Digital Labor Digital Transformation

I Filed Over 50 Patents in 5 Years—and AI Is Supercharging My Creativity

Creativity Super Charged by AI in color cloud

I haven’t been writing much lately.

But I’ve been building.

Over the past six months, I’ve been heads-down rethinking our entire business through the lens of Generative AI. Not hypotheticals. Not slideware. Actual workflows, strategy, code, delivery.

Writing’s always been a passion of mine. But my real obsession has always been this:

How can we use technology to do things better, faster, smarter than before?

The bigger the impact, the more lit up I get. And AI?

It’s the most transformative shift I’ve seen in my entire career.

Creative Thinking Doesn’t Always Land—Until it Does

I’ve always had a knack for looking at problems differently—and not always in ways people immediately understand. I’ve said things in rooms that earned more WTF stares than nods. Like the time I told a group of execs their Salesforce implementation wasn’t working because it ignored how Marc Benioff actually designed the platform to be used.

Didn’t land. But I wasn’t wrong.

That same pattern of pushing boundaries is what led me to average 10 patent filings a year at IBM. It’s what pushed me into mobile. Then into Salesforce and MuleSoft. And now?

Generative AI.

Love at First Prompt

So The first time I opened ChatGPT, I didn’t give it a sophisticated prompt. I just poked at it. And I immediately knew:

This wasn’t like anything I’d touched before.

Unlike traditional Machine Learning (ML) models or Salesforce Einstein, it didn’t need perfectly structured data. It didn’t need months of training cycles.

It just… knew.

It could reason. It could write. It could follow your thinking and even challenge it when needed. With the right context, it could co-create.

AI isn’t replacing creativity—it’s accelerating it.

Since then, it’s helped me do just about everything better:

  • Strategize faster
  • Write cleaner
  • Pitch sharper
  • Rethink delivery entirely

It’s like having an infinite brainstorm partner that never gets tired, never loses context, and never asks for a meeting.

Clearing Bottlenecks at the Speed of Thought

As a founder, my most limited resource isn’t money. It’s time.

Before AI, the thinking part—the storytelling, the big-picture planning—was the bottleneck. Not anymore. I’m shipping ideas faster, experimenting more freely, and scaling myself into parts of the business I never had the bandwidth to touch.

No other invention I’ve seen has unlocked that kind of leverage. Period.

We’ve Been Building Toward This for a While

People assume this all started when AI became the hot new thing. It didn’t.

At Green Irony, we’ve been building toward this moment for years:

📎 In It’s Groundhog Day, I warned that companies would trip over their own systems just like they did during the digital transformation wave—because integration was an afterthought.

📎 In AI-Enabled Applicant Screening, we showed how to combine OpenAI and MuleSoft to streamline real-time HR decisions.

📎 In AI Readiness and Mobile, I drew a straight line from mobile disruption to what’s coming now.

These weren’t side projects.

They were signs of what was coming.

We didn’t just start talking about AI when it hit the news—we were already shipping.

The Reinvention Is Here

This isn’t just a pivot. It’s a total reinvention.

We’re rebuilding how we deliver value. How we structure teams. How we partner with clients. Everything we touch now runs through the question:

“How can intelligent agents work alongside humans to 10x impact?”

And we’re starting to see answers.

You’ll hear more soon—about new offerings, smarter systems, and customer stories that show what happens when you fuse execution with intelligence.

We’re not just watching this wave.

We’re riding it.

And we’re inviting our clients and partners to do it with us.

Categories
Agentforce Digital Labor Digital Transformation Higher Education Implementation MuleSoft Salesforce Strategy

Higher Education’s Efficiency Crisis has a Technology Solution

I’m very passionate about Higher Education and its missions and outcomes because they’ve been really impactful in my own life and in the lives of loved ones.

I was always passionate about technology and did what I could to learn about it, but I didn’t have access to the resources of wealthier families from bigger cities nor the internet as we know it today. So getting the opportunity to attend a high-end computer engineering institution like Virginia Tech literally changed my life by getting me an opportunity to be a developer and architect at IBM in the middleware space.

My sister also does a lot of great work in infectious diseases at UNC Chapel Hill and they do really meaningful work that benefits everyone on the planet. But over the last few months, they are under unprecedented scrutiny to make massive changes, basically overnight. I know from personal experience that changing this rapidly is monumentally difficult for a startup like Green Irony that grew from one person to thirty in five years, let alone a massive organization like a 30,000 student university and research institution.

Higher education and non-profit organizations face an unprecedented budgetary challenge and these economic drivers force Higher Ed to prioritize at both strategic and tactical levels. And technology is the key to success.

The way technology is applied in these institutions resembles what I saw in industry in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By rapidly bringing the technology to what we see in the present day, Higher Education and non-profit organizations can equip themselves to navigate these budgetary challenges without sacrificing their missions.

Current State of Higher Ed Technology

Higher education has long relied on niche solutions and entrenched education-focused technology providers. While these providers have deep sector expertise, their technology stacks remain outdated, rigid, and cumbersome. Unlike commercial industries, which adopt at-scale, flexible technology solutions to streamline complex operations and manage data and systems at scale, higher ed institutions are frequently stuck managing fragmented, siloed systems that drive inefficiency at scale.

This situation is highly problematic because it spreads labor resources across a ton of different platforms while also making it more challenging to deliver impactful technology solutions.

In short, it costs way more to get lesser outcomes that take way longer to deliver.

This at scale problem surfaces itself with numerous symptoms. A few examples:

  • Disjointed communications with students or other key constituents in the form of text messaging and emails
  • Labor-intensive, time-consuming support services for financial aid, donations,  enrollment, IT helpdesk, and other table stakes areas of student success
  • Inability to understand the student and proactively detect issues despite having the information to do so
  • Working out of multiple systems that have disconnected copies of the same data, resulting in lots of error-prone data entry for key personnel
  • Large IT investments with lengthy implementation timelines and unclear ROI
  • Multiple copies of the same system (e.g. Salesforce) across departments, disabling their ability to deliver value at scale

These problems are all symptoms of the same root cause: not leveraging IT investments in a modern way that meets the needs of today’s constituents.

And this should come as no surprise: higher education and non-profits exist to deliver on their missions, like research and educational outcomes. They are not in the business of digital transformation.

But these problems were all solved commercially in the 2010-2020 timeframe, and Higher Education’s problems are exactly the same as those. So why not solve them in a proven way?

Using Technology More Effectively

So where do you turn? A stack comprised of #1 and #2 below was heavily leveraged by for-profit organizations who faced these challenges a decade ago. #3 is a new entry that simply must be considered because of its stunning outcomes:

  1. A flexible system of engagement and marketing platform (e.g. Salesforce) that enables you to address high-impact problems for constituents
  2. An integration platform (e.g. MuleSoft) that allows you to make your systems talk to one another, allows them to be accessible by AI Agents, and enables you to perform a smooth migration from legacy systems
  3. A platform for leveraging digital labor (e.g. Agentforce) that enables you to fine-tune AI Agents to help you accomplish tasks like student support services more easily and effectively so you can concentrate on your mission

Modern platforms like Salesforce are incredibly capable of delivering exponential operational efficiencies, higher constituent satisfaction, and helping do more with less. But they must be applied correctly in order to deliver value. So you need to make sure you have a very clear, granular plan to deliver value to the organization that starts to compound over time. And you need the right team to execute the plan.

I have boatloads of examples of how this type of thing impacts organizations at scale (positive and negative), but I don’t want to make this blog waaaaaay too long. I’ll share that in another one. The key takeaway is that it’s important to have a really good plan that lets your technology investment grow more lucrative over time through economies of scale with a skilled technology team to execute on that plan.

If you do this correctly, you can be like UNC Charlotte, who is experiencing around 50% deflection of IT cases with a simple Agentforce implementation. Or Spirit Airlines, who saw a 5X+ increase in time to value of IT investments after an API strategy unified its legacy systems from silos to a comprehensive solution.

Conclusions

Higher education must embrace robust, commercially proven technologies that offer scalability, integration, and flexibility. Migration and implementation may initially seem daunting, but the alternative—clinging to outdated systems—guarantees continued inefficiency and escalating costs. Numerous high-impact outcomes result in massive budget savings:

  • Digital labor to enable human labor to focus on higher impact work
  • Technology-driven efficiency gains the entire connected campus
  • Technology investment license cost savings
  • Technology investment labor savings

The technology approaches I see in Higher Ed and non-profit resemble those I saw in for-profit organizations in the 2010-2015 timeframe. By catching up, they can realize massive budget savings and increase focus on their outcomes that matter.

As I said in the opener, I’m passionate about Higher Ed and non-profits and I’d love to help. If you’re a higher education leader wondering how technology systems can help with your current crunch, drop me a line.