I launched beAIfirst in February 2026. The conviction behind it goes back years. But the reason to hire us is about what you need to do now.
You may already use AI every day. You can see what it could do for your business. The next step brings questions that matter: Can it work with your information? Can you control where that information goes? What will it cost when the whole team uses it? Who will make it work with the systems you already rely on?
I built beAIfirst to help you answer those questions and carry the work through.
The Bet I Made in 2018
In 2018 I bought beaifirst.com. I believed AI would become part of how businesses operate, shaping the services they offer and how their people get work done.
That belief came from building with the technology and seeing where the difficult work actually was: understanding the problem, getting the right information into the system, and making the result useful to someone.
The Long Runway
I started building machine learning models around 2014, during my PhD research in psychology. Data science gave me a way to investigate questions using evidence and turn what I learned into something practical.
My career path surprised people: I transitioned from being a rabbi into data science, and in 2016 took my first data scientist role at Travelport. Over the next several years, I worked in AI and analytics at companies including BP and Priceline.
Those roles taught me to look beyond what a model can do in isolation. Its value depends on the information it receives, the decisions it supports and the people responsible for using it.
Thinking About AI and Travel in 2018
While working in travel, I wrote 3 ways AI is driving the future of travel. The manuscript, dated September 28, 2018, described consumers relying on AI agents to search and book trips, and travel providers responding to those agents through their own AI systems.
Originally published in Inside BigData, that article is now republished here on beAIfirst because the original link is no longer reliable. The tools have changed enormously since I wrote it. The business question remains: how do you turn that capability into something valuable for your customer?
I kept building. I started Invown, a crowdfunding investment platform, continued investing in real estate and used AI in my own work.
When My Own Way of Working Changed
By late 2025 and early 2026, I was using AI to take on more substantial work in my businesses. It changed how quickly I could explore an idea, build something and test it.
The Weekend That Changed My Expectations
I asked my team to build a new module for Invown. The initial estimate was eight weeks, then five. I took the requirements and used AI tooling to build a working version over a weekend, including a user interface, credentials and a deployment.
That experience changed my expectations of what I could attempt myself. It was one module in a business I knew deeply; it was not a delivery estimate for someone else's project. Testing, security review and the responsibilities of running software still matter.
PurposeLife: Bringing Research Into a Product
I also rebuilt PurposeLife, a purpose-development program based on my PhD research. We rebuilt the paper-based, human-led process as an AI-first coaching system. An AI coach guides people through the method, with assessments, coaching conversations and career exploration forming a structured journey.
Invown and PurposeLife are my own ventures. They are part of the experience I bring to beAIfirst, and we identify them separately from client work on our proof page.
What Our First Client Needed
Our first paying client, 101, the real estate investment firm led by Ryan Cockerill, had a concrete requirement. He had developed a plan with Claude and needed experienced implementation judgment. We reviewed the plan, kept what fit his business, changed what did not, and built the underlying database and ingestion infrastructure so agents could work with incoming deal information.
That engagement is one example of our work. Your requirement may be entirely different: introducing a service, connecting existing tools, changing where AI runs or bringing operating costs under control. We need to understand your situation before recommending what to do.
Why beAIfirst Exists Today
You shouldn't have to become an AI infrastructure specialist to move your business forward. You do need someone who can understand what you're trying to achieve, explain the tradeoffs and implement an approach you can operate.
That is the work we take on. Sometimes it means configuring a product you already have. Sometimes it means connecting systems, preparing your data, deploying a model privately or building a custom component. The choice follows your requirements.
What That Means for Your Business
- You have something you want AI to help you do. We help define the outcome, evaluate the available options and implement the work needed to get there. Existing products belong in that evaluation alongside custom development.
- Your information needs to stay under your control. We help work through data access, provider terms and deployment choices, including private cloud, self-hosted models and on-premises options where appropriate. We make the dependencies and operating responsibilities explicit.
- The economics need to work at real usage. We assess model choice, token consumption, workflow design, hosting and maintenance together. We can optimize an existing deployment and test changes against the quality you need. Running a private model also carries costs.
- Your team needs to be able to use and run it. We agree how the work will be tested, where human judgment is needed, what will be handed over and who will look after it. Training and ongoing support can be scoped around those needs.
We agree the scope, deliverables, costs and responsibilities before implementation. You can read more about our services and implementation approach.
Start With What You Want to Make Possible
Bring us the goal you keep coming back to, the deployment requirement you need to meet or the cost that is making you hesitate. Tell us what you already have and what a useful result would look like.
Our first conversation is about your situation and whether we can help. You don't need to complete an audit or commit to a build to have it.
