Speaking & Writing
The work I do happens in private rooms. This page is the part that doesn't: talks, panels, and writing on organizational change, AI governance, technology risk, and negotiation. If you want to know how I think before we ever have a conversation – start here.
On the Horizon
Upcoming Talk
AI Marketing Forum · Sep. 10, 2026
An encore of the July talk, this time for the AI Marketing Forum. The fear of models “calling home” is legitimate – it's just aimed at the wrong layer of the stack. What actually changes when you run AI on hardware you control, and the five business questions that decide whether you should.
Upcoming Panel
Colorado Startup Week · Sep. 14, 2026
Back on the fractional panel for a third time, at Colorado Startup Week with Crys Black moderating. For founders deciding how to get executive judgment before they can afford executive payroll: when a fractional leader beats a full-time hire, how to structure the engagement, and the early signs it's going sideways. I'm the technology seat, and the one who'll say what happens when the business and technical sides stop lining up.
Upcoming Panel
Hacking HR · Sep. 22, 2026
Third session in Hacking HR's AI@Work series, and the one that moves from the tools to the people using them – or being replaced by them. Leadership says augmentation; employees hear displacement. I take the infrastructure seat: what these tools are actually measuring, what gets labeled “productivity,” and what HR never sees in the dashboard.
Upcoming Talk
Cyber Cheyenne 2026 · Oct. 16, 2026
A solo session at Cyber Cheyenne, a one-day summit for regional IT and security leadership. Every company has an AI strategy now, usually several – one per department, bought separately, governed by nobody. What that looks like from the technical side of the gap, why the risk conversation keeps happening after the incident, and what leadership has to agree on before any policy is worth the paper.
Featured talk
RMAIIG Marketing Subgroup · Jul. 2026
The fear of foreign models “calling home” is legitimate – it's just aimed at the wrong layer of the stack. What changes when an organization runs AI on hardware it controls – privacy, cost, model provenance, and who owns the guardrails when there's no cloud vendor in the loop.
Talks & Panels
Tribute
RMAIIG Product Subgroup · Aug. 2026
Forty-five minutes to build something live while the Gamemakers changed the rules as I went. The crowd asked for an homage to The Oregon Trail, set in space, and The Mizar Trail was born. Then a sealed envelope arrived, handed to me alone – a mascot, mid-build – and I read it out loud. Blue the Space Ox joined the crew. In most companies, that envelope never gets read to the room.
Panel
Hacking HR · Jul. 2026
The technology and governance voice on a panel with employment counsel and HR leaders: where bias actually enters HR tools – data, model, and integration – what "our model is proprietary" usually means, and the audit questions worth asking before signing.
Talk
CPTO Fracs community · Jul. 2026
Product and engineering misalignment isn't a morale problem – it's a line item. This talk puts numbers on the rework, the stalled decisions, and the quiet duplication that show up when the two sides stop agreeing, and shows where the bill actually lands.
Panel
Hacking HR · May 2026
The IT and governance voice on a panel with HR and legal perspectives: what happens when AI enters hiring and performance decisions, and who's accountable when nobody agreed on the rules first.
Panel
Boulder Startup Week · May 2026
A panel of fractional executives on how early-stage startups get executive-level leadership long before they can afford executive-level payroll – when founders are actually ready for it, which functions matter most at each stage, and how fractional leaders de-risk the full-time hires that come later. Korey was the technology voice, on fractional CTO/CIO leadership through the jump from traction to real scale.
Talk
88 Owls Alumni · Apr. 2026
Capable leaders don't make bad compromises because they don't know better – they compromise because pressure changes how they decide. A talk for negotiation-trained alumni on the FOG that clouds high-stakes decisions (fear, obligation, guilt), how bias turns into a coping mechanism when the stakes rise, and why AI is compressing the pressure systems companies already had.
Talk
AI Pioneers Club · Oct. 2025
A working session on the Model Context Protocol – the open standard Anthropic released to be the 'USB-C for AI,' collapsing the tangle of custom tool-to-data integrations into one shared language. Korey covered what MCP is, why it matters for an integration strategy, and live demos of connecting an AI assistant to local files and APIs through MCP servers.
Panel
Colorado Startup Week · Sep. 2025
A panel on what fractional executive leadership actually is, when it makes sense for a growing company, and what founders should expect from a part-time leader with full-time accountability. Founders heard from a powerhouse panel of seasoned fractional executives – spanning sales, marketing, finance, non-profit, operations, AI strategy, HR, legal, and IT – who shared insider stories of how they solved real-world problems.
Selected Writing
Article
LinkedIn · Jul. 2026
Organizations don't fail all at once – they fail in layers. The seven-layer networking model, repurposed for tracing visible breakdowns – priorities that won't hold, decisions made twice – to the layer where they actually started.
Article
Colorado AI News · Feb. 2026
What the Silicon Flatirons conference revealed about infrastructure risk: AI governance conversations stop at the software layer, while the real exposure – power, cooling, physical infrastructure, and the organizations that run them – goes unexamined.
Interview
The CIO Circle · Apr. 2025
A long-form Q&A for The CIO Circle's interview series: the path from writing code to advising founder-led companies, why the technology leader's job keeps turning into translation, and the advice that survived thirty years – be the leader your people are willing to talk to, no matter how difficult the topic.
Most of what I write about, I write about because I keep seeing it. If it sounds familiar, that's usually worth a conversation.
From the Archives
From the archives: a published testimonial on leading Rackspace Email's move away from a monolithic codebase – developer scalability, lower coupling, and consistency at scale. Still cited by Particular Software a decade later.
From the Rackspace Email years – how a large cloud email provider kept spam and viruses out of customer inboxes and protected deliverability at scale, and the technologies and partners behind it.
