About David Martin.

I find the point where work gets stuck, then design the system that gets it moving again.

Most of my work starts with a familiar situation. An organization has capable people, useful information and plenty of technology, yet the work still moves slowly because knowledge is scattered, processes are unclear and the tools were never fitted to the job. I study how the people and the process actually interact, then design something simpler that the team can trust and keep using.

My training is in science. I hold a BSc in Physics and a Diploma in Engineering from Mount Allison University, and that grounding in analysis and systems has shaped how I approach every role since. Today I design and build AI agents, knowledge systems and the workflows around them, and the questions I care most about are knowledge, workflow, governance and the people who have to use the result.

For more than a decade I have been responsible, end to end, for content, brand, marketing and proposal operations at a long-established Canadian IT company, working directly with its managing partners and directors. The role has always involved more than producing communications. It meant building the processes, information structures and approval paths behind them, so a small team could compete for public-sector work against much larger firms. I have been the primary author on more than 30 public-sector and enterprise bids, for buyers including WorkSafeBC, BC Transit, BC Ferries, BC Assessment, PHSA, Island Health, Fraser Health and the City of Richmond. It also meant sales enablement: the battlecards, sales sheets and training that help a sales team explain technical services in plain business terms. The largest example was a response of roughly 300 pages, managed with a 15-person team over several weeks, which won a 20-year contract. The credit belongs to everyone who carried it.

Since 2024 my focus has been applied AI. I have designed and implemented AI-assisted proposal development, content approval workflows, bid tracking and internal training. Each of these connects the company’s knowledge, business rules and human review to AI tools people already use. Underneath them sits a company-wide knowledge base I built from information gathered across the company, so every agent and project works from the same approved picture of the business.

The central design question in this work is where automation should stop and human judgment should take over. I answer it with the people who will live with the system, because they know where the real risks are. That is also why training matters as much as the build. New tools ask a lot of people who already have full days, so I stay close while they learn and celebrate the first real win with them.

My approach to AI comes from directing. Set the objective, provide the context and define the constraints, then direct the work and review the result before it goes out. People get far more from AI when they treat it as a capable crew rather than a search box, and I have written that method into Getting better results from AI at work, a free guide series and course (The Director’s Chair).

Creative production has run alongside all of this. In 2006 I founded DJC Media, an independent animation studio where I handle every production myself, from story and character design to animation, edit and release. Its DJC Kids channel has passed a quarter of a billion YouTube views.

Before my current role, I was development coordinator and head grant writer for Zajac Ranch for Children, where I brought in more than $162,000 in grants and donations, including a first-time maximum award of $50,000 and a first-time $30,000 donation from Dempster’s Foods.

Before that, I spent ten years in Japan directing curriculum development and teacher training for a group of language schools, working entirely in Japanese, and I also took on technical translation for Honda and editing for Canon Marketing. Training teachers in a second language taught me patience, and how much people can do when someone believes they can.

The discipline has stayed the same throughout. Understand the system and listen to the people inside it, find the friction, then design something better and make it work in practice.