About

Mark Jones

IT Consulting Specialist

I'm Mark Jones. I've spent the last twelve years as an IT consultant, working with businesses on their technology problems — which, most of the time, turn out not to be technology problems at all.

Twelve years of that teaches you one thing above everything else: software never enters a business the way the vendor's diagram says it will. It arrives sideways. Somebody has a deadline, finds a tool that works, and starts using it. By the time it shows up in anyone's plan, half the company already depends on it and nobody remembers deciding. Every wave has worked like this. AI is just the fastest one yet, because this time there's nothing to install and nobody to ask.

This past year my work has been almost entirely AI, and the job that changed how I think about it was a small family dental practice. Their office manager was losing hours of every day to routine work — the kind nobody questions because it has always been done that way. We pointed AI at the parts of it that made sense. It saved the practice thousands of dollars and gave her back hours of every day.

Nothing about that was exotic. It was one person's ordinary week, looked at honestly, by someone who had seen the shape of the problem before. That's the part that stuck with me: nearly every business has an office manager somewhere — a person quietly absorbing hours of work that doesn't need a person. Finding those is most of what I do now. Making sure the fix doesn't quietly cost you something you can't see is the rest.

What I actually think about this

Almost everything written about AI right now is written to sell you something, and it comes in two flavours: it will change everything, or it will end everything. Both are useless if you run a fourteen-person business and have to decide what to do on Monday.

The interesting question was never whether AI works. It plainly works. The question is what it costs you when it goes wrong in a way you couldn't see — a client list somewhere you can't reach, a contract breached without anyone noticing, a tool that quietly made things up for eight months while everyone trusted it.

Security isn't the opposite of moving fast. It's the thing that lets you move fast without betting the business on it.

And your team already knows where the work hurts. They've been telling you for a year by what they quietly automate behind your back. Most of this job is looking at that honestly, before somebody outside the business looks at it for you.

What I won't do

I won't sell you work you don't need: Some businesses are already fine, or have one small problem that doesn't need a consultant. If that's you, I'd rather say so on the call than invoice you for confirming it. The referral is worth more to me than the engagement.
No decks, no frameworks, no maturity model: You get a written plan in plain language: what to stop this week, what to put in place, what it costs. If a recommendation needs a diagram with four quadrants to justify it, it probably isn't a recommendation.
I don't sell you software: I don't resell tools, take vendor commissions, or have a partner tier to protect. When I tell you a tool is the right one, the only thing riding on it is whether I was right.
I won't tell you AI is going to replace your team: It's the oldest line in this market and it's mostly used to sell things. The useful question isn't whether AI can do someone's job — it's which parts of the work are quietly costing you, and what it costs when a tool gets one of them wrong.