John Margerison

John Margerison is an entrepreneur who has run and advised companies for over two decades, from small businesses upward, and who spent all of it on the non-technical side of the table. He hired engineers, briefed them, argued with them, paid them, and carried it when what they built did not work. He has never been a professional programmer. For most of his career he thought that was a weakness.

In June 2023 he began using AI seriously, and he got most of it wrong. The record of that is in the book: a figure out by a factor of three in a live client document, a quality gate that ran for a year without ever rejecting anything, an AI-generated briefing that reported a startup had raised $82.4 billion. Every technique in The AI Manager is one he learned by getting it wrong first, on real work, with real consequences.

He then directed a team of twelve engineers building AI products across several industries and learned to build alongside them. The point was never the code. It was getting decades of business judgement pointed directly at the work instead of through somebody else.

He now writes and teaches for people who run something, are not technical, and can feel the ground moving. The AI Manager is the book, free to read online. The course built from it runs online and ends in a Certificate in AI Management. He lives in Santa Monica, California.