Getting people to adopt AI
I introduced AI to a senior military college full of people whose job is to poke holes in things. It worked because I taught first and sold second, and reached roughly three-quarters of the faculty along the way.
About
From joint planning to building with AI.
I'm John Lester. I've spent my career as a Navy officer, mostly around operations, strategy and planning, and I'm now making the move into AI work full-time.
The turn happened at the Joint Forces Staff College, where I taught strategy to senior officers and government civilians. When generative AI showed up, I didn't wait for guidance from above. I wrote the school's first GenAI course, ran hands-on labs for the students and faculty, and started building tools for the problems I kept seeing in my own classroom: journaling assignments that were just check-in-the-box events, stale case studies, and briefings rebuilt from scratch every year.
That grew into a two-year effort. I taught first to build some trust, then let the tools follow once people understood what they were looking at. The audience made it hard in a useful way — senior officers are trained to distrust anything that sounds too good — so nothing survived unless it proved useful. A fair amount did.
These days I'm at Commander, Naval Air Forces Reserve, doing enterprise planning and force development for a big, spread-out aviation organization. It's a different job, but the hard parts are familiar: scattered knowledge, work that gets rebuilt over and over, a lot of people who need to stay pointed in the same direction. That's most of what drew me to AI in the first place.
I build outside of work too. I have built web and iOS apps, an agent runtime, and a handful of tools my family uses. Building with these tools daily is how I keep myself honest about what they can and can't do, while pushing the tools and myself to be better.
Now I'm looking to take all of it — the adoption work, the teaching, the building — somewhere new.
What I bring
A few things I'm good at
Designing how people learn with AI
I wrote the school's first GenAI course and built the tools that went with it — reflection coaches, interactive case studies, leader personas, red-team partners for wargaming — all aimed at making people think harder, not less.
Building the actual software
I produce real things, not just slide decks: custom GPTs, web appt, iOS apps in Swift, a local-first agent runtime. I write code with AI tools, so I know where they help and where they get in the way.
Planning at scale, under scrutiny
Years of joint planning and staff work taught me to turn a commander's intent into something people can act on, juggle competing priorities, and explain a hard decision to a skeptical room.
The track record
What I've actually done
- Ran a two-year AI effort at the Joint Forces Staff College: the education side (a course, workshops, consults) and the tools side, built in parallel so each one fed the other.
- Wrote and taught GenAI 101, the school's first AI course, to cohorts of senior officers and government civilians.
- Built the Reflections GPTs — reflection coaches that ask hard questions instead of accepting a paragraph. Student writing came back four to ten times longer and a lot more thoughtful.
- Built 30-some tools over two years, from a classroom planning canvas to a suite of red-team GPTs. Several logged 100+ sessions in a single cohort.
- Now I do enterprise planning and force development for Navy Reserve aviation — the same problems AI is good at, minus the AI, for the moment.
What I'm after
Work where adoption, teaching, and building all matter.
AI adoption and enablement · AI program or product management · Learning, training, and instructional design · Solutions engineering and other build-and-talk roles