I'm John Lester. I've spent my career as a U.S. Navy pilot and educator, mostly around aviation, strategy, and planning, and I'm now moving into AI work full-time.
The turn happened at the Joint Forces Staff College, where I taught joint planning and strategy to senior officers. When generative AI showed up, I didn't wait for guidance from on high. I wrote the school's first GenAI course, ran hands-on labs for the faculty, founded the National Defense University's AI Community of Practice, and built more than 20 custom tools for the problems I kept seeing in the classroom and on staff.
That grew into a two-year adoption effort. I taught first to build trust, then let the tools follow once people understood what they were looking at. The audience made it hard in a useful way, since senior officers are trained to distrust anything that sounds like a pitch, so nothing survived unless it earned its place. A fair amount did, reaching roughly 150 faculty and staff and more than 500 students.
These days I'm an Aviation Operational Support Force planner at Commander, Naval Air Forces Reserve, and I use GenAI.mil against live planning and staff work. It's a different job, but the hard parts are familiar, like scattered knowledge, work that gets rebuilt over and over, and 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, including web and iOS apps, an agent runtime, and a handful of tools my family uses. Working with these tools every day is how I stay up-to-date about what they can and, probably more important, what they can't do.
Now I'm looking to turn all of it, the adoption work, the teaching, and the building, into a new career.