John Lester AI Adoption · Strategy · Education
John Lester

I help people use AI effectively

A Navy pilot and educator who led the AI adoption effort at the Joint Forces Staff College, now pushing the limits of GenAI.mil to solve real-world problems facing military staffs today.

  • Active TS/SCI clearance
  • U.S. Navy pilot, 2,650+ flight hours
  • M.S. Systems Engineering, B.S. Computer Science
  • Active GenAI.mil user
See the work Read my story
LinkedIn ↗ jmlester@gmail.com
33 documented projects since 2024
17 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.

Projects 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, including red-team GPTs, wargaming aids, and the enterprise planning I do now for Navy Reserve aviation.

Projects like CNAFR Enterprise Planning and Commander's Update Dashboard.

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 uses.

Projects like Pulsar 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

Over two years the effort moved JFSC from AI-wary to routine use, reaching roughly 150 faculty and staff and more than 500 students. It produced 20+ deployed tools, an AI-use policy, and a community of practice, and several pieces outlived my tour, including the policy and the Reflections coaches faculty kept using after I left.

CNAFR Enterprise Planning and Force Development

Enterprise planning and force development utilizing GenAI.mil for Navy Reserve aviation, a large and spread-out organization where the hard part is keeping a lot of moving pieces pointed in the same direction.

Workflow & Planning Tools 2025-2026 Active
Read the case study

Outcome

Ongoing. I support force development for the Aviation Operational Support Force and use GenAI.mil against live planning and staff work every day, which is where I'm learning the real last-mile of enterprise AI adoption.

Department of Curious Notions

A local-first AI idea workspace presented as a living, animated government office, with a structured docket system, AI-assisted development, and a full agent runtime under the hood.

Personal AI Systems 2025-2026 Active
Read the case study

Outcome

In daily personal use, and the ideas in it are now spinning off into new builds. It proved out the patterns I care about in an AI tool, the local-first, inspectable, provider-agnostic, and gated approach.

How I work

A few things I believe

The most effective AI solutions are individualized tools

A grading assistant, a reflection coach, a workflow diagnostic, a one-time use web app. When a tool is built around a specific problem instead of a generic chat box, people see the utility and learn to embrace the technology.

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 are ever going to accept.

Adoption is taught, not mandated

You can't snap your fingers have your entire organization become AI literate. At JFSC I started with teaching what AI is, showing how it can help, and importantly, where AI was NOT the solution. Approaching organizational change in this transparent way accelerated adoption and trust in the systems we developed.

I prototype to fail quickly

I build solutions with AI coding tools every day and get things in front of real users early. If they provide practical utility they get refined and iterated upon. If not, I learn from the experience and archive them.

Get in touch

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

If you're hiring for AI adoption, transformation, 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