Operator · Builder · Theorist

I build the systems I’m warning you about.

Twenty years inside the optimization machine — a paper route at nine to the executive floor, deploying enterprise AI before it was a headline. I’m not method-acting the working class for a byline; I’m the longitudinal study. The clearest view of how technological power actually gets distributed is from inside the room where it happens.

01 The Operator

Inside the machine, on purpose.

For two decades I’ve worked inside the optimization machine — customer experience, technical account management, enterprise digital transformation — and today I lead a technical-account team at Zendesk, guiding large enterprises through the shift to AI-first support.

Here’s the part most people skip. My employer isn’t one of the three companies that own this. We pay them — a lot. Almost everyone is a tenant; that’s the point. The concentration reaches up and taxes even the winners.

I sell adjacent to the very thing I’m warning you about. That’s exactly why I can see it.

Complicity, named, is authority — so I name it first, every time. The critique isn’t aimed at the thousands of companies and millions of people downstream who rent the capability. It’s aimed at the handful who own it.

Receipts: Six Sigma Black Belt · 15+ years leading distributed teams
Published author, The Technical Account Manager’s Playbook · views are my own, not my employer’s.

02 The Theorist

The Inversion

This is the paper my whole education was training me to write — communication and media studies, development economics, and the AI frontier, finally pointed at one question.

For two hundred years, every major information technology eventually leaked the power to create back out to ordinary people. The press, the telephone, the internet: monopolized for a while, then the capability diffused. I argue artificial intelligence is the first to run the other way — because its core input, frontier compute, is scarce, capital-intensive, and owned by a handful of firms. Cheap access to use a model is not possession of the means to make one.

The argument is built to be proven wrong; it names the exact conditions that would do it. A claim about contestability should stay contestable.

→ Read the working paper → The open questions

03 The Builder

I don’t just theorize the alternative. I build it.

The thesis says capability is being concentrated, and that the way out has to be built rather than waited for. So I build it. Chump is a self-hosted AI coding agent with persistent memory and bounded autonomy — it runs on local models, on your own rails: your keys, your data, your compute. No tenancy required.

The full workshop — Chump’s architecture, the open-source work, the rest of it — lives at the builder’s site.

→ jeffadkins.dev

04 Writing

Connective Intelligence

I write where the systems thinking goes — the craft of technical account management on the days it’s that, and quantum rabbit holes and the political economy of systems on the days it’s that.

→ Read at Connective Intelligence