About Ben
I am an AI educator, speaker, and consultant. My background is unusual for this field, and it is the reason my teaching works: I spent over a decade in classrooms, training rooms, and academic leadership before AI arrived, so I learned how people actually adopt new technology long before I started teaching this one.
By day I serve as Director of Curriculum and Assessment at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am a published textbook author through Labyrinth Learning and a doctoral candidate in Educational Leadership, with research focused on educational technology and institutional change.
When modern AI arrived, I made a decision that shaped everything since: I would learn it by building with it. I wrote a 14,000+ line automation pipeline that publishes a daily AI newsletter. I shipped a commercial product. I built agents with memory and live voice, deployed AI inside my institution with human-in-the-loop review, and assembled a self-hosted stack of 40+ services on hardware I put together myself. That practice continues every day, and it keeps my teaching honest - when I tell an audience what AI can and cannot do, I am reporting from experience.
The same experience made me allergic to hype. AI brings real risks, real limitations, and real ethical questions, and I treat those as part of the curriculum. Attendees and clients consistently say the honesty is what let them finally move forward - skeptics included. My sessions ranked first of 65 at the EMU Gen AI Summit on exactly that approach: clear teaching, working examples, and no inflated promises.
I built a life through the AI transition, and I have helped hundreds of others do the same - through summit workshops, consulting engagements, the Shared Sapience publications, and the community that grew around them. If you are working through that same transition for yourself, your team, or your institution, that is the work I do.
The path
2012 - 2013
Corporate training
I started by teaching Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, and media design at New Horizons for corporate clients, including the eBay Utah Data Center and Utah government offices. Students there rated me among the top 10 instructors worldwide, out of thousands.
2014 - 2020
Higher-ed classroom and program leadership
At Southwest Technical College I taught across Business and Digital Media while directing the program, and I led the only department with five consecutive years of growth in enrollment, attendance, and graduation. During this period I also authored Microsoft Word 2019 & 365 for Labyrinth Learning.
2020 - present
Academic leadership
As Dean of Education, then LMS Administrator, and now Director of Curriculum and Assessment at Washtenaw Community College, I have led enterprise system migrations, faculty enablement, and institution-wide change. The role taught me how adoption really happens inside organizations.
The AI turn
Building a life through the transition
When modern AI arrived, I treated it as a craft to learn rather than a headline to react to. I taught myself to build with it - pipelines, products, agents, and a full self-hosted stack - and rebuilt my own work and practice around what I learned.
Now
Bringing it to others
Today I teach, speak, and consult on practical AI full of the lessons that came from doing it myself. My summit sessions rate at the top of their programs, and Shared Sapience carries the teaching to a daily audience.
Work with me
Speaking, workshops, consulting, or the community - the door that fits you is open.
Book a call