The next big thing isn't your next best step.

Growing up in New York, a kid dreams of two things. Playing for the Knicks, or, when you find out that you're not athletically inclined, then getting the best education the city has to offer.

Without recognizing it as a career path, I always loved technology. From video games to computers, I was captivated, and I wanted to learn everything I could about emerging tech.

Technology seemed to confuse and frustrate people in ways I had never seen before. Adults always appeared to have a full grasp on the world I was still exploring and learning as a child. Yet the internet and digital transformation seemed to invoke a fear and a lack of understanding, all from the uncertainty of its applications.

So as I learned, I taught. First helping my mom record Oprah on her new VCR, and my dad transform his record collection so he could carry it in his pocket. Then I helped startups and Fortune 100 organizations do the same with their business processes. And it taught me the thing I am still doing now: technology is only as good as the community it serves, and how it is presented, adopted, and implemented makes all the difference.

At some point I became obsessed with startups. I had built my first company with friends in college and made a lot of mistakes, so I went to learn on the job. I didn't know how rare the experience was: an early hire at a Y Combinator company, and at another that ran its go-to-market on Play Bigger's category design.

I learned what it takes to build something from nothing and carry it up the mountain to scale, to become a “category king,” just like the iPod did. And I learned the harder truth underneath it. Anyone can build now. Knowing what to build, and building something that actually matters to the human being who will use it, is what separates the companies that make it from the ones that quietly do not.

And the second dream, the one about the best education the city had to offer?

I am finishing it now. A master's at Columbia, on the other side of the same city I started in. Not because the resume needed one more line. Because the pursuit was always the point.

And the timing could not have been more perfect. I went back to study artificial intelligence right as generative AI moved from research papers to boardroom mandates, which gave me something most people never get: two environments at once. Columbia was the lab. Apple was the enterprise. What worked in the classroom shipped at work.

That is where the work I do now got its reps: AI strategy and readiness, AI governance and responsible adoption, workflow automation with large language models and agent workflows, and the change management that turns a pilot into a rollout people actually use. I automated my team's Monday meetings, streamlined my account research, and spearheaded internal AI implementation and use cases, in-house and with my clients: agents and chatbots at scale.

And in the schools where this story started, I help educators and leaders make sense of everything happening in AI, so it reaches students instead of passing them by.

The day you stop learning the new thing is the day you stop being useful to the people building the future.