About
Thirty-five years writing software. Five years working hands-on with AI. One strong opinion: most organizations do not need more AI tools, they need three workflows that actually work.
I have spent my whole working life on the unglamorous side of technology: making systems do reliably, every day, what somebody promised they would do once in a demo.
That started with 35 years of professional software development — C#, ASP.NET, Angular, the full stack, in teams and on my own. It carried on through five years of hands-on work with generative AI, including AI consulting at IBM, and it is exactly the background that makes me skeptical of most AI marketing.
Because here is what I keep finding. The organizations that get real value out of AI are almost never the ones with the biggest tool budget. They are the ones who picked three boring, repetitive tasks, built a proper process around them, taught their staff to run it, and left everything else alone.
So that is the practice. I sit with business owners, office managers, pastors and nonprofit directors in Fresno and across the country, work out where their week is actually going, and build the handful of workflows that give some of it back.
How I work
01
A language model will tell you something wrong with total confidence, and it will do it in your voice. Every workflow I build has a way to check the output against a real source, and every training session teaches people to look for the failure rather than admire the fluency.
02
If I cannot explain what a system is doing in language you would use with a customer, I have not understood it well enough to sell it to you. No jargon, no acronym fog, no pretending complexity is expertise.
03
Everything I build is documented and taught, and it lives in your accounts rather than mine. If you stopped working with me tomorrow, your workflows would keep running. The retainer exists for new questions, not to keep the lights on.
04
A fair number of my free calls end with me telling somebody to fix a spreadsheet, hire a part-timer, or change a process — and not to spend money on AI at all. That costs me work in the short term and earns trust that lasts longer.
The other half of the work
Alongside the consulting practice I write, produce and publish AI-assisted Bible story films for children — 84 of them so far, in English and Urdu, at roughly two a week. They are used by Sunday schools in California, by 17 churches in Kenya through Jesus Frees Ministries, and by families in Pakistan.
I also teach Christians how to use AI honestly: treating model output as a claim to verify rather than an authority to trust, and being clear about where a machine's confidence ends and discernment has to begin.
That work is not a side hobby that happens to share a name. It is where the production pipelines, the multilingual workflows and the verification habits I bring to clients were built and stress-tested, week after week, on a real publishing deadline.
References
Aaron's technical skills, teamwork, and business focus made him an invaluable contributor to our development team. The way he gladly receives and gives help to and from others contributes to a culture of servant leadership among the team.
He has provided wonderful tools for using AI to lighten the workload in ministry — from spreadsheets to photo collages to translating texts we send to our 20 Kenyan pastors. If you want to work smarter and have more time for reaching people for Jesus, I highly recommend him.
It is with a high recommendation that I suggest Aaron Tenney to you as a very capable IT professional. He has used his excellent skill set to create a unique relationship between us and our community of followers. His honesty and integrity are his greatest strengths.
Tell me what your team keeps doing by hand. I will tell you honestly whether AI can take it off their plate, what it would take, and roughly what it costs.