John Lester

I help people get the most out of AI.

I'm a Navy pilot moving into AI work full-time. For the last couple of years I ran the AI adoption effort at the Joint Forces Staff College where I wrote its first GenAI course, taught the faculty workshops, and built a few dozen tools for specific teaching and planning problems. These days I do enterprise planning for the Naval Air Forces Reserve, and I keep learning, experimenting, an building with AI on the side with web applications, agent runtimes, and innovated AI system experiments.

See the work More about me

LinkedIn ↗ jmlester@gmail.com

33 documented projects since 2024

23 live or in daily use shipped, not just sketched

~75% of JFSC faculty in a workshop over the life of the initiative

4–10× longer student reflections once the writing got AI feedback

What I work on

Three kinds of problems

14 projects

AI for Learning & Education

The work I did at the Joint Forces Staff College: a GenAI course, faculty workshops, and tools that make students reason instead of retrieve.

Like JFSC AI Initiative and GenAI 101 for Professional Military Education.

See these projects 7 projects

Decision Support & Planning

Tools for staff work and planning — red-team GPTs, wargaming aids, and the enterprise planning I do now for Navy Reserve aviation.

Like CNAFR Enterprise Planning and Force Development and AI Knowledge Capture Interview System.

See these projects 12 projects

Products & Personal Systems

Things I built because I wanted them to exist: iOS apps, an agent runtime, and a few household tools my family actually uses.

Like Morning Brief / AI(de) and Department of Curious Notions.

See these projects

A few highlights

Work I'm proud of

All projects

JFSC AI Initiative

My two-year effort to bring AI into the Joint Forces Staff College. I ran an AI literacy program for faculty and students and built the custom learning tools that went with it.

AI-Augmented Learning 2024-2026 Active

Read the case study

Outcome

I ran a two-track AI effort at JFSC for two years. One track was education, and it included a GenAI course, faculty workshops, and one-on-one consults that built real AI literacy across the college. The other track was the tools, a set of custom GPTs and learning systems built for specific teaching problems rather than for show. Each track made the other stronger, and together they changed how faculty and students at the college work with AI.

GenAI 101 for Professional Military Education

A practical introduction to generative AI for PME students and faculty, built around real coursework and planning tasks. I built it using AI itself, on purpose, as a way to test whether the idea held up.

AI-Augmented Learning 2024-2025 Active

Read the case study

Outcome

I built the college's first generative AI curriculum and taught it to several cohorts of senior officers and civilian equivalents. It is a reusable, modular lesson with four hands-on labs, and other faculty have taught it across later course iterations. I built the curriculum using AI as the design tool, the experiment worked, and it produced a set of lessons about AI-assisted content development that fed straight into later work.

Reflections GPTs

Interactive reflection systems that replace static journals with guided Socratic dialogue, challenge, and quick feedback, and produce measurably deeper student engagement.

AI-Augmented Learning 2025-2026 Active

Read the case study

Outcome

Replaced static reflection submissions across roughly 20 lessons with interactive Socratic dialogue. Students who engaged with the system routinely wrote thousands of words across many turns, far more than the old submissions produced, and several transcripts shown to instructors revealed students genuinely wrestling with the material rather than going through the motions.

How I work

A few things I believe

I build tools for one job

A grading assistant, a reflection coach, a planning canvas. When a tool is built around a real problem instead of a generic chat box, people trust it and keep using it.

People stay in charge

The tools I build draft, challenge, and check work, but a person makes the call. That is the only version of AI a room full of skeptical officers was ever going to accept.

Adoption is taught, not mandated

You cannot order people to use AI well. At JFSC I started with teaching — what it does, where it fails — and let the tools follow. That order is the whole reason it stuck.

I ship and then find out

I build with AI coding tools every day and get things in front of real users early. The ones that genuinely help stick around. The rest I learn from and drop.

Get in touch

I'm leaving the Navy and looking for my next thing in AI.

If you're hiring for AI adoption, learning and enablement, or someone who can build the tools as well as talk about them, I'd be glad to hear from you.

Email me Find me on LinkedIn