Lance Gardner

Practical AI adoption, built on infrastructure that holds.

I'm Lance. I help leadership teams put AI to work in the environment they actually have, with the identity, security, and infrastructure to back it up.

I like comparing notes with people leading AI adoption, from small businesses to mid-sized companies to the enterprise.

Lance Gardner

Projects

I still build things. Each project gets its own address on this domain.

DNS Desk showing its standard scan screen
Live

DNS Desk

A free DNS toolkit. Scan a domain for the records you did not know to ask for, compare public resolvers, and check email settings. I built it for the moment you inherit a domain and nobody can tell you what is in it.

Open DNS Desk
Planned

AI adoption field guide

A practical guide for mid-sized organizations, drawn from real engagements.

Planned

AI readiness self-assessment

Answer a short set of questions and get a scored report with next steps.

What I work on

The same four areas come up in almost every engagement, and they depend on each other more than most plans admit.

AI adoption and governance
Readiness, usage policy, model selection, and keeping agents contained to what they should touch.
Identity and security
Conditional Access, network segmentation, email authentication, and the policies that hold them together.
Infrastructure and cloud
VMware, Hyper-V, and Azure, with AWS and Google Cloud where the work calls for them.
Microsoft ecosystem
Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Power Platform, from licensing decisions through rollout and training.

Credentials. Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator and Power Platform Functional Consultant. VMware Certified Professional since 2010 across data center, desktop, and network virtualization. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Writing and speaking

What I have published and presented on putting AI to work. The series starts from real conversations with clients and teams, not from trend reports.

An eight-part series on putting AI to work

  1. AI readiness foundations
  2. Decision-making frameworks
  3. Adoption and the people side
  4. Model dependency and business continuity
  5. Data governance
  6. Agent containment
  7. AI workflow orchestration
  8. Model selection economics
Read the series on LinkedIn
Webinar, September 2024, about one hour

Smarter, Better, Faster: AI Tips for SMBs

An introduction to AI for small and mid-sized businesses that I co-presented with my firm's COO. We covered how the major AI tools differ, how to prompt well, what AI can and cannot do, and the data security questions to settle first, followed by live demos.

Watch on YouTube

Working through AI adoption where you are? I would like to hear how it is going.

Connect on LinkedIn