I didn't come to AI from Silicon Valley.
I spent ten years in the U.S. Army running logistics operations — moving people and materials, solving problems where being wrong had consequences. That's where I learned to build systems that hold up under pressure, and to explain them to people who don't care how the machine works, only whether it works.
When I came home, I became the freelance developer small business owners called when they needed to go digital. Websites, systems, automations — digitalization was my lane. My job was simple: take the owners the tech industry overlooked and put them on equal technological footing, one build at a time.
Then my wife — Dr. Dawn Nicole McIlwain, a global trainer and expert in curriculum and training design — and I co-founded Skilldora. She knew exactly how people learn. I knew exactly how to build. Together we did something nobody in America had done: accredited certification courses taught entirely by AI digital human instructors, recognized by the CPD Standards Office in England. First in the country — three years before AI became something everybody had an opinion about.
Since then: four books, a weekly podcast, keynotes from corporate conferences to church sanctuaries, and seventeen systems shipped for title companies, construction firms, HBCUs, ministries and workforce nonprofits. The mission hasn't moved — make AI accessible, actionable and profitable for the people the tech industry keeps skipping.
