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"The most important question any of us can learn to ask: should I trust this? And am I in a state of mind to know the difference?"
About
I'm a marketer, an AI builder, and the person who sits between the technology and the people who have to live with it. For seventeen years I've worked inside enterprise brands. For the last two, I've been building AI tools for them, watching in real time how this technology is reshaping what millions of people think, decide, and trust.
my story
I grew up in Monroe, Michigan, and started in marketing the way a lot of people in this region start. At the bottom, in a small office, learning to make things that move the needle for businesses that didn't have much margin to spare. I got my B.S. in Marketing from the University of Toledo and spent the next decade in the Detroit advertising ecosystem, working on social media and digital strategy for brands like Cadillac, Ram Trucks, FIAT, and Jeep before any of those channels were considered serious work.
That early grind taught me the most important thing I know about marketing: the audience is always smarter than the deck. If you're not paying attention to what people actually do when they're alone with your brand, you don't really know your brand.
The work scaled up from there. I ran product at FordDirect during the digital reset of automotive retail. I led strategy on Chevrolet at Weber Shandwick. Today I serve as Senior Vice President of Strategy at one of the world's largest communications agencies, where I act as senior counsel to clients on connecting business objectives to actual human behavior. The clients I've served across my career include Philips, P&G, Gillette, Capital One, Mazda, Royal Caribbean, Clorox, Samsung, General Motors, and Ascension Health.
In 2020, my wife Lauren and I co-founded TRA, which stands for That Random Agency, out of Detroit. It's a small, independent shop built as an alternative to overly complex, ego-driven agencies. If you've ever sat in a status meeting and wondered who half the people on the call actually were, we built TRA for you. That Random Agency is also where my speaking, advisory, and Lighthouse work are based.
That early grind taught me the most important thing I know about marketing: the audience is always smarter than the deck. If you're not paying attention to what people actually do when they're alone with your brand, you don't really know your brand.
The work scaled up from there. I ran product at FordDirect during the digital reset of automotive retail. I led strategy on Chevrolet at Weber Shandwick. Today I serve as Senior Vice President of Strategy at one of the world's largest communications agencies, where I act as senior counsel to clients on connecting business objectives to actual human behavior. The clients I've served across my career include Philips, P&G, Gillette, Capital One, Mazda, Royal Caribbean, Clorox, Samsung, General Motors, and Ascension Health.
In 2020, my wife Lauren and I co-founded TRA, which stands for That Random Agency, out of Detroit. It's a small, independent shop built as an alternative to overly complex, ego-driven agencies. If you've ever sat in a status meeting and wondered who half the people on the call actually were, we built TRA for you. That Random Agency is also where my speaking, advisory, and Lighthouse work are based.
Professional Journey
In 2024, a client asked me a question I couldn't answer. What is AI telling people about us?
Nobody knew. The tools to answer it didn't exist.
So I built one.Lighthouse is an AI brand intelligence platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity perceive, describe, and recommend brands. Think of it as a brand perception audit for a world where the most fluent voice in the room is increasingly non-human. Building it gave me a front-row seat to a shift I'm not sure most of the people writing about AI have actually seen.
Most AI commentators are either technologists who understand how the systems work, or cultural critics who understand how they affect society. I'm neither. I'm a practitioner who sits between the two. Close enough to the technology to know what it actually does, close enough to the consumer to know what it's actually doing to them.
That vantage point is what produced my TEDx talk, Ask Anything: AI, Emotion, and Influence. It's what produced my forthcoming book of the same name. And it's what I bring to stages, podcasts, and consulting engagements with companies trying to make sense of AI without the hype, the dread, or the Silicon Valley vocabulary.
I'm based in Detroit, Michigan. I write a newsletter on Substack called Modern Moxie. I'm a husband and a dad. And I once had a panic attack in an ER waiting room and got comforted by a chatbot. That last part turned out to matter more than I expected.
Nobody knew. The tools to answer it didn't exist.
So I built one.Lighthouse is an AI brand intelligence platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity perceive, describe, and recommend brands. Think of it as a brand perception audit for a world where the most fluent voice in the room is increasingly non-human. Building it gave me a front-row seat to a shift I'm not sure most of the people writing about AI have actually seen.
Most AI commentators are either technologists who understand how the systems work, or cultural critics who understand how they affect society. I'm neither. I'm a practitioner who sits between the two. Close enough to the technology to know what it actually does, close enough to the consumer to know what it's actually doing to them.
That vantage point is what produced my TEDx talk, Ask Anything: AI, Emotion, and Influence. It's what produced my forthcoming book of the same name. And it's what I bring to stages, podcasts, and consulting engagements with companies trying to make sense of AI without the hype, the dread, or the Silicon Valley vocabulary.
I'm based in Detroit, Michigan. I write a newsletter on Substack called Modern Moxie. I'm a husband and a dad. And I once had a panic attack in an ER waiting room and got comforted by a chatbot. That last part turned out to matter more than I expected.