Twenty years at Morgan Stanley
turning complex financial technology
into meaningful commercial outcomes.
Now, I do the same thing with AI.
What I Do
AI is changing how companies operate, and the pressure to respond is real. Boards are asking their executive teams for an AI strategy. Competitors are already implementing. But for most leadership teams, the challenge is not the technology. It is how to start and sequence, where the genuine efficiency gains are, and who to trust to help them think it through. These are senior judgment calls, and they require experience that goes far beyond the technology itself.
That is the work I have done throughout my career. At Morgan Stanley, I developed products and led businesses that took quantitative research, financial engineering, and derivatives strategy and turned them into measurable financial impacts for clients. Complex technical subject matter, senior commercial relationships, and the need to be fluent in both. The domain has changed; the work has not.
I use the tools. I build production software with AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Codex, Google AI Studio among them — and automation tools like n8n. I work at the level of context engineering: structuring how AI systems receive information so they produce reliable, production-grade outputs. The projects include a patient-facing healthcare application currently in development, automation systems that publish content at scale, and productivity tools that run complex workflows from a single instruction file. These are working systems with real users. I build them because it is the best way to understand what works and what fails. The advice I give is shaped by that daily practice — because in AI, last quarter's understanding may already be out of date.
Background
Before AI, I spent two decades in institutional leadership. Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, working across New York and London. Co-founder of a boutique investment firm. Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School. I also ran a global nonprofit and served in ambassador-level diplomatic roles, which are different domains but required the same thing: making consequential decisions in complex environments with imperfect information.
I have spent my professional life in rooms where senior people make difficult calls under real pressure. That is the environment I understand and the audience I serve.
When I advise a company on AI, I am drawing on that experience as much as on the technology itself. I understand how organisations actually adopt new capabilities, where institutional resistance comes from, and what moves a leadership team from cautious interest to committed action. Knowing the tools well is critical, but the extensive commercial judgement is what makes the advice worth paying for.
Here.Now.AI
Between 2023 and 2026 I co-founded and grew Here.Now.AI, a weekly AI newsletter that reached more than 20,000 subscribers. The publication helped non-technical professionals understand and apply AI tools in their working lives.
Building that audience gave me something I could not have acquired any other way: sustained, direct exposure to how people and organisations actually encounter AI in practice. Twenty thousand subscribers asking questions and reporting where they got stuck. I learned what confuses people, where adoption stalls, and what leadership teams consistently get wrong. That understanding informs every advisory engagement I take on.
Working Together
I take on a small number of engagements at a time. The work is focused on commercial outcomes, not on AI for its own sake.
For companies: I help leadership teams figure out where AI fits in their operations and how to implement it with discipline. This typically involves strategy work and tool evaluation, and often extends into workflow design. Where it is useful, I build working prototypes to demonstrate what is feasible before a company commits to a larger investment. I have done this with organisations encountering AI seriously for the first time and with teams that have stalled after initial experiments.
For investors: I provide portfolio-level AI guidance for venture firms and accelerators, working across multiple companies to evaluate AI readiness and help portfolio leadership decide where to invest in AI capability. My background in investment management means I understand what the fund cares about and can frame AI opportunities in those terms rather than in purely technical ones.
Speaking and workshops: I present to senior professional audiences on AI adoption, drawing on first-hand building experience and what I have observed working across industries. Suitable for audiences that are past the introductory stage and want a substantive conversation about implementation.
If any of this sounds relevant to what your organisation is working on, I would welcome hearing from you.
Contact
Justin Simpson
practicalai.co
Email: justin@herenowai.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justinssimpson
San Francisco Bay Area