Most AI consultants come from tech. Michael comes from education. That difference matters.

I did not come to artificial intelligence (AI) from technology. I came to it from the classroom.

For over a decade, I worked in education and career development, first internationally at SolBridge in South Korea and in Qatar, then at the University of California Santa Cruz, and I earned a doctorate studying one specific question: why does training so often fail to change what people actually do. I trained more than seven hundred professionals during those years, and I watched the same pattern happen again and again. Someone gets excited about a new tool, tries it once, and quietly lets it die in a browser tab because nobody showed them how to make it stick.

When AI arrived for small business owners, I watched that exact pattern start all over again. Business owners in the South Carolina Midlands and beyond were hearing about tools that could genuinely save them time, but nobody was teaching those tools the way an educator teaches. They were being sold to instead.

That gap is why I founded Artificial Intelligence Educational Solutions (AIES) in November 2025.

I stand for a Human-First AI approach. That means the business owner stays in charge of the judgment, the relationships, and the final decisions, and the AI handles the repetitive work that was eating their time. It means I build tools with the people who will use them, not for them from a distance. And it means teaching comes before selling, always.

I work with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), especially service businesses like heating and air companies, in the South Carolina Midlands and nationally. The people I serve are not looking for hype. They are looking for something practical they can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon, built for the way their business really runs.

Most AI consultants come from technology. I come from education. That difference shapes everything about how I work, from the questions I ask before I build anything, to the way I explain what a tool is doing and why.

If you have wondered whether AI could actually help your business, rather than just adding one more thing to figure out, I would like to hear what you are working with. That conversation is where this usually starts.

See if this could work for you