Randy Jones

AI strategy & product leadership

AI leadership for the real world

I'm Randy Jones. I work on AI strategy and product leadership, and I still build software, with AI agents writing the code. Building keeps the strategy honest.

I write about the unglamorous part of AI adoption: giving people room to experiment safely, and making sure what they learn doesn't stay stuck in one team.

Read the writing Email me
Black-and-white portrait of Randy Jones

Selected writing

A few posts that show how I think about AI inside an organization. The writing page has a suggested reading order.

All 24 posts

  • Why AI pilots stall, and what to build instead

    Most AI pilots stall for organizational reasons. A budget, a sandbox and a shared record of what works do more than another round of pilots.

    Experimentation and adoption · 4 min read · Updated September 2026

  • An AI budget for every employee

    Give people a small monthly AI budget, no approval per experiment, inside a sandbox. The people closest to the work will find the use cases.

    Experimentation and adoption · 4 min read · Updated September 2026

  • Reward the idea, not the rank

    If a junior analyst and a CEO have the same good idea, they should get the same reward. How I'd set up an innovation fund that works that way.

    Leadership and governance · 4 min read · Updated September 2026

  • When a custom AI agent is worth building

    Most teams should pilot enterprise AI they can buy, wired to their systems with MCP, before building anything. Building pays in a few narrow cases.

    Vendors and platforms · 7 min read · Updated September 2026

What I write about

  • Experimentation and adoption

    Budgets, sandboxes and shared learning: how people actually start using AI at work.

    5 posts

  • Leadership and governance

    Where decisions sit, how ideas get rewarded, how skills and roles change, and how to tell if it’s working.

    6 posts

  • Data and knowledge

    Metadata, content lifecycle and the data plumbing that agents depend on.

    4 posts

  • Vendors and platforms

    SaaS lock-in, data portability, Microsoft Copilot, multi-cloud and build versus buy.

    6 posts

  • Agents and tools

    MCP, orchestration, coding agents, and a longer view of where this is heading.

    4 posts

  • Research notes

    Plain-language notes on AI papers: what they showed, what they might change, and what happened next.

    10 notes

Get in touch

I'm happy to talk about AI strategy, adoption, governance, or a problem you're working through. Email is best. My full resume is available on request; tell me a little about what you're working on.