Why I'm Starting This Newsletter

Real stories from embedding AI into organizations — federal agencies, enterprises, and startups. No theory, no hype, just what actually works in the field.

I didn’t start in tech. I went to school for biology.

But I’ve always been technical-adjacent — the kind of person who built gaming rigs, hosted my own servers, obsessed over networking equipment, and min-maxed every game I touched. Hypercompetitive. Efficiency-obsessed. If there was an optimal path, I’d find it.

That mindset carried into work. I joined a company when it had one U.S. employee and helped grow it into a mid-sized federal contractor. I wasn’t in one lane — I played every role. BD, sales, customer success, program management, procurement, proposals. Senior leadership for a while. But my real specialty was creative problem solving in situations where there was no playbook.

Eventually, I wanted to spend more time with my family, so I took a heads-down program role. But I couldn’t just put my head down. The work felt inefficient. Meaningless. I was wasting time.

So I started learning automation. Excel scripts at first, using Claude to write them for me because I wasn’t a coder. That unlocked something. I got hooked.

From there: LLM-powered workflows with n8n. Then I built my first RAG agent for a federal agency — and presented it to the CISO. That’s when I realized my positioning was unique.

I’m not a developer who can’t see the forest for the trees. I’m not an executive who only knows how to delegate. I’ve been in every seat. I’ve done the hard work. I know how to talk to decision makers and technical teams. I understand people, processes, and what actually gets adopted versus what dies in a pilot.

That’s what this newsletter is about: field stories from actually deploying AI.

Not theory. Not hype. Not “10 ways AI will transform your business.”

Real stories from embedding into organizations — federal agencies, enterprises, startups — and building systems that actually work. The messy decisions. The political blockers. The technical constraints. What fails and why. What works and why.

I’m writing this because the AI discourse right now is dominated by two camps:

1. Researchers and theorists who’ve never shipped anything real

2. Vendors selling magic solutions that don’t survive contact with reality

There’s a gap. That gap is where I operate.

If you want to see how AI actually gets deployed — the good, the bad, the “why didn’t this work” — you’re in the right place.

Welcome to Forward Deployed.

— James