AI that earns its place
Useful systems start with the work, the people, and the decision. The model comes later.
AI product leader, builder, and writer
Dan Patrick Smith.
I work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, product leadership, and organizational change.
Read the field notes
01 / Current thinking
Three ideas I keep returning to.
Agents need structure
Memory, tools, skills, and guardrails matter more than another clever chat interface.
Leadership is leverage
The job changes when your judgment has to travel through people, systems, and culture.
02 / Writing
Notes from the middle of the change.
Essays about building useful AI, leading through uncertainty, and turning new capabilities into real systems.
AI product leadership
The agent is not the product
Builder's note
I built a skills bank before people had agents
Enterprise AI
Business outcomes before AI capabilities
03 / Reading
What is shaping my thinking.
Two books currently on the shelf, with room for work and life to inform each other.
Enterprise AI / Operating model
Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI
A timely perspective on evolving enterprise applications with AI, from useful capability to transformational business outcomes. I am especially interested in how it builds on Kersten's earlier Project to Product, which helped reshape how the industry thinks about flow and value.
View the bookFiction
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Also on the current shelf.
04 / Selected work
Things I have made real.
AI SkillsBank
A visual home for saving, versioning, organizing, and moving agent skills between AI tools. Built from a personal need during the first wave of persistent, tool-using agents.
Visit the product Product leadership
From possibility to business outcome
Framing the right problem, aligning technical and business teams, and creating conditions for good decisions.
Agent fieldwork
Learning by building
Working directly with memory, tools, skills, portability, and the practical limits of autonomy.
05 / About
I am interested in the point where technological possibility meets human reality.
I lead AI product work inside a large, regulated enterprise and build independent experiments to understand where the technology is heading next.
Outside the work, I am a husband and father of three. I make room for writing, hiking, biking, golf, Formula 1, and the occasional idea that refuses to leave me alone.