What this is.
You sense your experience and the AI conversation are colliding, and you haven’t found anyone who holds both ends of the rope.
You’re in the right room.
The work is moving faster than it used to.
The people you rely on for judgment are asking questions they wouldn’t have asked two years ago.
The chapter you’re heading into doesn’t quite fit the shape of the chapter behind you.
Something is shifting. Not broken. Shifting.
Your experience isn’t behind you. AI just made it the rarest thing in the room.
This is the publication for that.
Most weeks, I write one essay for the people doing this kind of work, whether you’re navigating it in your own life or figuring out how AI lands inside your organization. The premise: how to use everything you’ve already built (three or four decades of judgment, pattern recognition, the wisdom of being in the room when things went sideways) and integrate it with what’s now possible.
What you’ll find here
Three questions I’m working on out loud:
How do I use AI to make my experience more powerful, not less relevant?
How do I design the next chapter of life with intention?
How do I build belonging when the office disappears?
They look like three questions. They’re really one: how do I show up fully, with everything I’ve already built and everything that’s now available, for the years ahead?
AI is the most useful tool I’ve been handed in years. It’s also useless without the wisdom to know what to use it for. The integration is the point.
Who I am, briefly
I’m Bennie. Early sixties. In Tacoma, Washington. Though “from Tacoma” wouldn’t be quite right. Born in Southern California. Raised my family in Washington. Lived a long chapter in Massachusetts. Now back in the Northwest.
I’ve spent forty years at the intersection of engaging audiences, adult learning, and human transformation. The titles changed often. The work didn’t. I’ve interned at Apple, led global training at Bose and Microsoft, headed product and marketing inside nonprofits, startups & SMBs, and ran my own consulting practice in between. Through every chapter, the same question: how do you help people grow, learn, and figure out what to do next?
The last eighteen months I’ve been building the kind of AI fluency most experienced professionals don’t have time for. Not as an AI evangelist. As someone still figuring out where human wisdom holds and where the tools genuinely extend what we can do.
That combination of AI capability and the judgment of someone who’s been through several reinvention cycles is what shows up in this publication.
Everything I build is for my wife, Julie, our children, and our grandchildren. They are the beating heart of An Intentional Age. My thriving for connection is both a lived practice and an effort: after nine years in a Seattle cohousing environment, we moved to a single-family home in Tacoma. Figuring out how to sustain and build a real community without that pre-existing framework isn’t just a personal transition—it is the central, ongoing experiment of this publication.
What you can expect
One essay most weeks. Substantial enough to be worth your time. You can reply to anything I send. I read everything.
If you want to go further
If you’re navigating this in your own life, or figuring out how AI lands inside your organization, book a 30-minute conversation. No pitch. Just two peers thinking out loud.
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One chapter ahead. Designing forward.
