Speaking & workshops
I've been teaching technical material for most of my career — classroom courses, hands-on hardware workshops, conference-room presentations, and years of live online teaching. The AI talks below are the newest material; the teaching isn't.
The short history: through Virtuabotix I taught 3D printing and design, Arduino programming, and embedded firmware — hands-on classes with real hardware on the table, because that's the only way that material sticks. In college I was president of my IEEE student branch. Since then the venues have changed — labs, conference rooms, live online audiences — but the job has stayed the same: take something technical and make the room genuinely understand it (and ideally enjoy the process).
What I offer now is below. If you run a business group, trade association, school program, or a team trying to figure out what AI actually means for its work, these are built for you.
Current talks
Three talks, each grounded in systems I run in production today. Every one adapts from keynote length down to a lunch-and-learn or up to a hands-on workshop.
Running AI coding-agent fleets safely in production
What has to exist around the models before agents can touch real repositories, real credentials, and real customer systems — work queues, credential custody, transport-enforced policy, and human approval gates. For engineering leaders and any organization deciding what "AI adoption" should actually mean.
Turning an operational process into software that fits
How a process that lives on paper, whiteboards, and one person's memory becomes a system of record — without flattening the way the team actually works. Built from doing exactly this for painting operations and manufacturing floors. For operations teams and manufacturers.
Practical AI automation behind human approval gates
Where AI genuinely helps a working business today, where it doesn't, and the controls that keep it out of trouble. For business audiences that are curious and skeptical in equal measure — the skepticism is welcome.
Formats and booking
In person across mid-Michigan, remote anywhere. Keynotes, lunch-and-learns, panels, and hands-on workshops — including educational sessions where the goal is that attendees leave having built something, not just watched something. If you have an audience and a topic in this territory, email joe@datepalm.media with the date, audience, and format, and I'll tell you plainly whether it's a fit.
If what you actually have is a project rather than an audience, start at datepalm.media/start — that's the working door.