Straight talk on life, leadership, and AI.
Keynotes, conversations, and workshops on the choices that shape our lives, our teams, and how we use AI.
Three conversations to start with.
Each one can be tailored for a keynote, a panel, a podcast conversation, or a hands-on workshop.
Living Life by the Rule of Sevens
If you had seven years left, what would you do? Seven months? Seven days? Seven minutes? A personal framework for putting priorities in perspective, defining your legacy, and living with intention, at work and at home.
Choose what deserves your time.
Use the Rule of Sevens to look at the same life through shorter and shorter time horizons. The exercise turns an abstract idea about legacy into choices you can make this week, with attention to the people, commitments, and work that matter most.
- Name the relationships and responsibilities you want your decisions to reflect.
- Spot the difference between an urgent demand and a lasting priority.
- Choose one concrete change to your calendar or habits, and a way to revisit it.
AI in the Public Trust
How cities, counties, and constitutional offices can adopt AI responsibly: where it helps citizens and staff, where it does not belong, and how to stay accountable to the public while you do it.
Start with a use case you can explain and supervise.
Build a practical starting point for AI in a public office: a defined task, an accountable owner, clear information boundaries, and human review. The conversation helps leaders connect an AI experiment to a service or operational need before deciding whether to expand it.
- Evaluate a candidate task by public value, sensitivity, and the consequences of a mistake.
- Define who reviews outputs, handles exceptions, and decides when the system should stop.
- Set a small pilot goal and a review process that staff and leadership can understand.
AI Independence: Don’t Build on Someone Else’s Land
Why public offices should never become captive to one AI vendor, and how to design for replaceability before cheap access turns into dependence.
Ask what happens when the provider changes.
Examine the dependencies behind an AI workflow, including its models, stored context, integrations, and operating rules. Leave with a more useful vendor conversation and a plan for testing whether the work can continue when a model, price, or service changes.
- Ask how prompts, context, records, and workflow settings can be exported and reused.
- Identify what would need rebuilding if your preferred model became unavailable.
- Plan a realistic continuity test, including its time, cost, and human responsibilities.
Additional topics
AI Operating Control
A practical framework for leadership visibility, governance, routing, and cost discipline as AI spreads across every department.
Make AI use visible enough to manage.
Connect individual experiments to a shared operating picture. Identify who owns each workflow, what it is allowed to do, how model choices are made, and where time and money are going. Use that visibility to decide which work to support, improve, or stop.
- Define a workflow owner and a review cadence.
- Choose useful cost and quality measures.
- Create an escalation path for unexpected outputs or spending.
Privacy Starts Before the Prompt
Your employees are not your AI privacy strategy. How to protect citizen data, records, and case files with policy and architecture, not just training.
Put information boundaries into the workflow.
Map what information a task needs before it reaches a model. Consider how minimization, approved tools, access controls, and review can support staff, so protecting sensitive information does not depend entirely on remembering a warning at the moment of use.
- Separate the information needed for the task from unnecessary sensitive detail.
- Identify where data travels and who can access it.
- Define how staff handle exceptions and questionable outputs.
The Agency That Agencies Use
Lessons from building a white label partner with 750+ agencies under contract: scaling through partners, confidentiality, and operational discipline.
Build partnerships that can support the work.
Explore the operating choices behind a white label business with more than 750 agencies under contract. The discussion covers handoffs, confidentiality, client communication, and the practical work of expanding services while keeping expectations and responsibilities clear.
- Clarify who owns each client promise and delivery handoff.
- Set communication expectations across the partner relationship.
- Evaluate capacity before adding the next service or commitment.
1 + 1 = 3: Leading Through Debate
Building teams that argue productively, reach real consensus, and pivot before the market forces them to.
Turn disagreement into a better decision.
Create room for people to challenge an idea while staying accountable to a shared result. The conversation focuses on how leaders frame a decision, invite opposing views, reach a conclusion, and revisit it when new evidence changes the situation.
- Make the question and decision owner clear before debating solutions.
- Separate evidence, assumptions, and personal preferences.
- Record the decision, the next action, and what would justify changing course.
Where I fit best.
Audiences: city and county commissions and managers, constitutional officers and their staff, state and regional government associations, business owners and agency leaders, Masonic lodges, and community organizations.
Bios, ready to copy.
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Short bio
Ken Knorr is the founder and CEO of Buildtelligence and That! Company. He helps municipalities, counties, and constitutional officers adopt AI without losing control, and shares a personal framework he calls the Rule of Sevens. Ken has been married to his wife, Tina, since 1988.
Full bio
Ken Knorr has worked in digital since 1996. After a career as an operations executive in homebuilding, he founded That! Company in 2007 with his wife, Tina, and built it into "the agency that agencies use," a white label partner with more than 750 agencies under contract. Today he leads Buildtelligence and ThinkFreely (thinkfreely.ai), helping municipalities, counties, and constitutional officers move from scattered AI experiments to governed, accountable AI adoption. He also publishes the Think Freely newsletter on Substack and hosted The Daily Drive Show. Outside of work, Ken is a Past Master of his Masonic lodge, a youth sports coach with more than 400 games coached (both of his children now coach, too), a woodworker who builds furniture, an avid fisherman, an astrophotographer, and the trainer of Gunny, a German Shepherd trained entirely in German. Ken and Tina have been married since 1988 and live in Central Florida. Their son, Mike, is Vice President of Marketing and Sales, and their daughter, L'ren, is a stay-at-home mom to Leo and Lily.
The Rule of Sevens, on the mic.
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