I spent fifteen years becoming very good at something that is changing faster than I can keep up with. That sentence sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but I mean it as the opposite — as context for why I’ve found this moment in technology so genuinely exciting.
My career was built on Adobe Experience Manager. AEM is enterprise-grade content management infrastructure — the kind of platform that powers the digital presence of banks, airlines, and healthcare systems. It’s complex, expensive, and requires specialists. For most of my career, being one of those specialists was a good place to be.
In 2025, I made a deliberate decision to pivot. Not away from digital transformation — that’s still what I do — but toward AI as the primary lens through which I understand and practice it. This blog is part of that pivot. So is the custom-built theme it’s running on, which I designed and built entirely with AI assistance. So is this post.
Why the Pivot?
The honest answer is that I’ve been watching AI compress timelines that used to define my value as a consultant. Content personalization, workflow automation, search and retrieval, multisite governance — the things that required months of AEM architecture work are increasingly being approached differently, faster, and sometimes better by teams with AI tooling and a fraction of the overhead.
That’s not a complaint. It’s information. And the information told me: the question isn’t whether to engage with AI, it’s how deeply and how quickly.
I also noticed something about where I found myself most energized in 2024. It wasn’t in the implementation sprints or the governance workshops. It was in the conversations about what AI could do to the workflows we were all taking for granted — the 6-week content migration, the 3-month component library build, the perpetual backlog of personalization use cases. Those conversations felt alive in a way that straightforward AEM delivery hadn’t in a while.
What I’ve Found So Far
I want to be specific here rather than just optimistic. Here’s what’s actually surprised me in the first year of treating AI as my primary professional focus:
The capability gap between “impressive demo” and “useful in context” is closing faster than expected. A year ago, AI coding tools produced plausible-looking code that fell apart on edge cases. Today, I built a fully functional custom WordPress theme in a single session — with real bugs caught and fixed iteratively, real design decisions made collaboratively, and a real result I’m actually running in production. That’s not a demo. That’s a workflow.
Domain expertise still matters enormously — but differently. The people I see struggling with AI adoption are those treating it as a replacement for thinking. The people I see thriving are those using their expertise to ask better questions, evaluate outputs more critically, and bring judgment to decisions the AI can’t make. My fifteen years of enterprise digital experience isn’t obsolete — it’s the thing that makes my AI-assisted work actually good rather than generically functional.
The most interesting applications aren’t the obvious ones. “Use AI to write content faster” is table stakes. What’s more interesting is using AI to collapse the time between strategic intent and working prototype — to make experimentation cheap enough that you can actually run experiments. That’s a different kind of value, and it maps directly onto what I’ve spent my career trying to help organizations achieve.
What I’m Exploring in 2026
The theme of this blog, and of my professional focus this year, is understanding what AI means for the work of digital transformation — not in theory, but in practice, with specific tools, specific use cases, and honest assessment of what works and what doesn’t.
I’m interested in questions like: What does an AI-assisted content operations team actually look like? Where do AI coding tools genuinely accelerate enterprise development, and where do they create new kinds of debt? How do you build AI literacy in organizations that are still figuring out basic digital maturity?
I don’t have definitive answers to any of these yet. But I have fifteen years of context for why they matter, and I have a blog that now looks the way it should. That feels like a decent foundation.
More soon.