Craft,engineered.
AI Engineer · Creative Technologist
I read where the tools are going, then build ahead of them.
Built from chaos, where craft is a discipline.
Where I started
At NJIT I took a work-study job in a small room called Instructional Media Services, mostly because I wanted to be where the work was. The job was putting professors' course material online and rebuilding the department site, and that room is where I learned web, video, design, and photography. It evolved into working in adtech and fintech, building Fortune 500 brands' marketing campaigns that scaled to global audiences, the A/B testing frameworks, and the data that compounds. I think in systems that scale AI-natively, the same way I approach creative problem solving. That means AI tutors, customer-support agents, UGC advertising, and the provenance that ties them to attribution.
AI is good at everything except the last 10 percent.
What I care about
The tools are very good now, and everyone has the same ones. A first draft, ten variations, working code: what used to take a week takes an afternoon.
Producing a lot of work quickly, and getting a rough first version of almost anything in front of you.
Knowing which of those versions is actually any good, and having the nerve to throw the rest away.
And that last ten percent is where the real work lives. It still takes 90 percent of the effort, and it's the part you have to do yourself.
Explore. Generate.
Refine. Scale.
The machine makes the options, we make the calls. In practice that works out to roughly 60 percent exploring, 20 building, 20 refining.
We can go further than we used to, and faster: interactions and shader code, not just static layouts.
It rarely lands first try, so we curate and keep tuning the prompt and the inputs until it does.
We keep what's working, fix what isn't, and take it the rest of the way.
Once something works, it becomes a system we can reuse.
The Brand Context Protocol.
Make your brand AI ready
Everything your brand sounds like, looks like, and stands for, in one place an AI can build from.
The one place that holds the voice, the design and the rules we build everything from.
A job the system has been taught to do your way, ready whenever you ask for it.
The finished work, drawn from Brand Truth and on-brand the moment it arrives.
A score on every output, and what it learns goes back into the source.
Move up the levels of AI.
The other half of what I do
This is the other half of what I do. I work with AI every day, on my own craft and my clients', and most of what I've learned is teachable. So I pass it on, through pilots that prove a real use case, hands-on workshops, upskilling for your team, and the change management that makes any of it stick.
It starts with where you actually are. AI adoption has levels, a bit like self-driving cars. At one end someone is pasting prompts into a chatbot, at the other a system runs whole jobs on its own. Most organizations are idling in the assisted-parking phase, and I help you move up a level at a time, so the tools compound instead of gathering dust after the demo.
- L1Chats People prompt by hand. Helpful, but nothing compounds.
- L3Workflows A task done the same good way every time, with a human reviewing.
- L5Agents Whole jobs run end to end, while people stay on the calls that matter.
The tools are everywhere.
The judgment isn't.
Get in touch
From idea to production systems for sales, product, design, creative, and engineering. I ship end to end without handing over the vision to get the work done.
jliu@trendingsociety.com