I build technology systems people actually use.
Nickolas Dowler · Business Systems Analyst at NVIDIA
Reduced annual COI reviews from 5,000 forms to 400 and cut cycle time from months to hours
Built a transfer system with a single auditable record across stakeholders
Drove a 67% reduction in attrition via cross-functional listening + action loops
What I Do
Keynotes & Conference Talks
AI governance, agentic workflows, adoption, and why self-service fails (and how to fix it).
Workshops for HR/IT/Product
Decision systems that scale, workflow design, adoption engineering, measurement.
Advisory
for leaders building platforms
A short sprint to clarify architecture, governance, roadmap, and the "operating model" that makes the system real.
Featured Writing
The SCALES Method: A Practitioner's Framework for HR Automation That Sticks.
Most HR automation projects fail because people skip straight to the tool. SCALES is a six-step method for building automations that survive contact with reality: Spot, Capture, Assess, Launch, Evaluate, Share. Here's the full framework.
Claude Skills FTW.
AI tools gave HR teams a copilot. Skills give them a playbook. The difference between an AI that helps you draft an offer letter and one that drafts offer letters the way your organization actually does them is a markdown file, a clear set of instructions, and an understanding of what your team's real workflows actually look like. Most HR teams haven't figured this out yet. The ones that do will build something more valuable than any vendor can sell them: institutional muscle memory that scales.
The Skill Atrophy Trap.
AI copilots deliver genuine productivity gains – 12% more tasks, 25% faster, measurably higher quality. But the first rigorous experimental evidence shows that workers become 19% less accurate on complex tasks outside AI's capability zone, endoscopists lose 20% of their detection ability after routine AI use, and the cognitive science explaining why has been staring at us for decades. Organizations optimizing for today's speed metrics may be systematically eroding the human judgment they'll need to supervise AI tomorrow.
Now: What I'm building and learning this month
- Creating end to end workflows in ServiceNow
- Managing stakeholder expectations with live Jira dashboard updates
- Examining use cases for AI governance committee
Connect With Me
Let's start a conversation