Two tools built for real problems. Neither needed AI. Both needed someone who understood the problem and picked the right tool.
The official course registration materials were genuinely confusing. Built a planner that surfaced the nuances and let cohort members visualize their full path. Nobody asked for it. The cohort used it anyway.
Forty Rice EMBA students, each choosing their own elective path. No visibility into who was taking what, no easy way to find study partners, no way to know if a class you were interested in had classmates you trusted. This dashboard fixed that. Students shared their selections voluntarily. The dashboard surfaced overlap, enabled peer coordination, and helped form study groups.
These tools exist because a problem was visible and a solution was within reach. Neither required machine learning or anything more sophisticated than clear thinking about what the user actually needed.
That judgment — knowing when to reach for a complex tool and when not to — is more valuable than the tools themselves.
These are the open tools. The consulting work lives at 99thcentile.com.
The consulting practice handles the problems that don't have obvious solutions — AI adoption, operational complexity, and the gap between what's technically possible and what actually gets used.