The long version, since you asked…
I learned this on a job site before I learned it in a boardroom.
I am Davie Holt. Speaker, coach, and AI strategist, based in Kansas City. What I actually do for a living is stand between two groups of people who need each other and cannot hear each other.
I did not start here.
I started swinging a hammer. Then I sold building materials to the guys still swinging them, which meant I spent years learning how a contractor decides whether to trust you, usually in about ninety seconds, usually before you finish your first sentence.
Then I moved into insurance technology, and something strange happened. The rooms got nicer, the words got longer, and the actual problem stayed exactly the same. Somebody had bought something. Somebody else had to use it. Nobody had asked the second person anything.
That gap is where I have made my whole career. Not because I am the most technical person in the room. I am usually not. But I can talk to the person doing the work and the person signing the check, and I can tell you why they think they are agreeing when they are not.
Translation is the job. Everything else is a tool.
Then AI showed up and did it again.
Same movie, bigger budget. Leadership buys the tool, announces it in an all-hands, and waits for transformation. The team nods, goes back to their desks, and quietly keeps doing it the old way, because admitting confusion in front of your colleagues is more expensive than pretending.
I got obsessed with that gap. Not the technology, the gap. So I started building things with people instead of presenting things at them, and it turns out that if someone builds the thing themselves, they will defend it. Nobody defends a slide.
Along the way I developed Hard Empathy, which came from watching good leaders fail in one of two directions. Too kind, and they enable. Too direct, and they wound. The framework is about holding both at once, and it has turned out to be the most useful thing I have ever made.
What that looks like now
Three things, one job.
Stages
Keynotes and conference sessions where a skeptical room leaves with a plan instead of anxiety. In person and virtual, nationally.
Rooms
Workshops and training for agencies and leadership teams. We build the thing together and your people keep it.
Communities
AI Rock Stars for the technology side, Hard Empathy for the human side. Because the best work happens weekly, not once.
A few things that are true about me.
I am a certified mediator, which is a strange credential for an AI guy until you realize that most technology problems are two people who have stopped listening.
I believe automation should give you more time with people, not less. Every system I build gets tested against that. If it makes you faster and less available, we built the wrong thing.
I am blunt, and I am not mean. Those are compatible. Most people have only ever seen them separately, which is exactly the problem I work on.
Use AI to be more human, not less available.
That’s the story. What’s yours?
If any of this sounds like the room you are standing in, let’s talk about it. Fifteen minutes, no pitch.
Book a call