Speaking & Writing

Thinking in Public.

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

Your First Executive Team Might Be Fractional – Colorado Startup Week 2026 panel with Crys Black (moderator), Jason Fletchall, Amy Giggey-Burns, Evan Meagher, and Korey Mercier

Upcoming Panel

Colorado Startup Week · Sep. 14, 2026

Your First Executive Team Might Be Fractional

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.

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Upcoming Panel

Hacking HR · Sep. 22, 2026

AI@Work: Augmentation, Displacement, and the Trust Gap in Between

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.

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Upcoming Talk

Cyber Cheyenne 2026 · Oct. 16, 2026

When Everyone Has an AI Strategy

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.

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Featured talk

RMAIIG Marketing Subgroup · Jul. 2026

Running AI Locally: What It Is, Why It Matters, and When to Consider It

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.

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Talks & Panels

The Acme Copy Desk demo app from the talk: a chat front end calling a local model through LM Studio on localhost, with source documents attached and a per-response receipt

Talk

AI Marketing Forum · Sep. 2026

Running AI Locally: What It Is, Why It Matters, and When to Consider It

An encore of the July talk for the AI Marketing Forum, delivered virtually. 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, the five business questions that decide whether you should, and a live demo: a small copy-desk app hitting a model running on a laptop, with no cloud in the loop.

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The sealed envelope and card from The Vibe Games: 'The Gamemakers demand more entertainment. New rule: your app must include a mascot.'

Tribute

RMAIIG Product Subgroup · Aug. 2026

The Vibe Games: Panem et Circenses

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.

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Panel

Hacking HR · Jul. 2026

AI@Work: Bias, Trust, and Transparency

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.

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Panel

Boulder Startup Week · May 2026

Your First Executive Team Might Be Fractional

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.

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Why Smart Leaders Compromise Themselves Under Pressure – 88 Owls Negotiations Alumni talk

Talk

88 Owls Alumni · Apr. 2026

Why Smart Leaders Compromise Themselves Under Pressure

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.

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Talk

AI Pioneers Club · Oct. 2025

Model Context Protocol: Connecting AI Tools to Your Pack

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.

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Panel

Colorado Startup Week · Sep. 2025

What's a Fractional, Anyway? How Part-Time Executive Leaders Drive Full-Time Results

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.

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Selected Writing

The Seven Layers of Organizational Failure – the OSI stack from Direction down to Reality

Article

LinkedIn · Jul. 2026

The Seven Layers of Organizational Failure

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.

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Interview

The CIO Circle · Apr. 2025

CIO Interview Series: Korey Mercier

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.

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Recognize your company in any of this?

Most of what I write about, I write about because I keep seeing it. If it sounds familiar, that's usually worth a conversation.

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From the Archives

  • Scaling Rackspace Email: Moving a Monolith Toward NServiceBus

    Particular Software · 2014

    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.

  • Presentation: Email Abuse from the Cloud

    M³AAWG · 23rd Meeting, Paris · 2011

    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.