Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner designed for enterprise velocity and measurable business impact, today announced the appointment of Brendan Flynn as Senior Vice President, Strategy within Robots & Pencils’ Studio for Generative and Agentic AI in Bellevue, Wa. Flynn will work with clients to ensure the strategies behind their AI investments scale and deliver the defined business outcomes.

Robots & Pencils has built its business around a solution-delivery flywheel, accelerating the velocity of delivery and client impact with live solutions launching weeks, not quarters. Flynn’s mandate is clear. Deliver the business outcomes for which clients are investing and put the foundation in place for agentic transformation to scale across the enterprise.

A Career Forged in Scale and Speed

Flynn hails from Capgemini, where he led large-scale product engineering and AI transformations for global brands in QSR, hospitality, and enterprise software.

His reputation is built on a rare pairing: the organizational change management expertise to shift how a company works, and the product engineering discipline to make the shift hold.

“Two decades working inside large Global Systems Integrators showed me exactly where the legacy delivery model strains under the demands of enterprise AI,” Flynn said. “That gap is why I’m here. Robots & Pencils was built to close it — and that’s what delivers the outcomes enterprises are chasing.”

Velocity Compounds by Design

The Robots & Pencils operating rhythm compounds by design. Production solutions reach testable market fit in weeks, not quarters, and from there rigorous evaluations turn real usage into the signal that drives learning, optimization, and scale. Flynn’s role is to align that rhythm to how each client runs, so the pace holds once the engagement scales.

“Executives are past the pilot stage. They want to know what changes in the P&L and when,” Flynn said. “Starting from proven patterns moves the conversation from ‘can this work’ to ‘what does this deliver, on what timeline, and what has to change in the organization to keep it running.’”

A Leader Built for This Moment

“Agentic AI enables companies willing to transform how the work itself gets done, not the ones that bolt it on,” said Len Pagon Jr., CEO of Robots & Pencils. “That rethinking takes a strategy set before the first line of code. Brendan has solved that problem before, at real scale. He’s been the client, and he’s been the partner. That combination is rare. Clients feel it in the first conversation.”

Built on AWS. Driven by Outcomes.

Flynn’s appointment follows recent company milestones, including AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status, one of only 11 inaugural AWS Pattern Partners selected from the global AWS Partner Network, the addition of Robots & Pencils’ Studio for Generative and Agentic AI in downtown Bellevue, and most recently, selection as an AWS BVR (Business Value Realization) Motion Launch Partner.

Robots & Pencils is unabashedly all in on AWS, and Flynn’s strategy work is aimed squarely at helping enterprise leaders get more from their AI investments and more from their investments in AWS.

“Live in weeks vs. quarters change the conversation,” Flynn said. “When a client sees something real in production that fast, the question stops being whether AI works and starts being how fast we can do it again. That is the moment I want to create, over and over.”

Ready to see what applied AI like inside your organization? Request an AI briefing with Robots & Pencils and find out what changes first.

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Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable business outcomes, today announced Jansen Meyers as Senior Vice President of Operations. Meyers joins the executive leadership team to scale delivery capacity, sharpen operational execution, and lay the operational foundation for the company’s next phase of growth.

Meyers brings more than 25 years working with organizations to drive scalability. Most recently, he spent 16 years at Centric Consulting as a partner concentrated on operations, technology and transformation leadership, where he helped enterprise clients and Centric modernize operations and execute company-wide transformations.

“We are focused on client outcomes and accelerating everything we do for our clients. Scaling our operations requires the same emphasis,” said Nathan Carmon, Chief Operating Officer of Robots & Pencils. “Jansen simplifies the complex and designs systems that let exceptional people maintain their focus on outcomes and acceleration, not internal work and systems.”

In his new role, Meyers will oversee internal operations, expand delivery capacity, and engineer the operational backbone behind every Robots & Pencils engagement, the systems that let Velocity Pods take generative and agentic AI live in weeks, not quarters. His leadership will help the company scale with the same agility, craft, and client focus that have defined the company since it was founded in 2009.

“Complexity is easy; efficiency is deliberate. My focus is eliminating drag, so the business moves as fast as its ideas,” said Meyers. “The people here already move like they have done this before. My job is to make sure the processes and systems never get in their way.”

Meyers joins Robots & Pencils as more organizations turn to the company to move generative and agentic AI from pilot to live. His appointment reflects continued investment in the leadership and operational depth behind Robots & Pencils’ AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Pattern Partner status, and its record of measurable business outcomes across 175+ clients worldwide.

Interested in a career with Robots & Pencils? View our open positions.

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AWS releases generative and agentic AI services faster than most enterprises can deploy them, and that gap is widening every quarter they wait. In June, the Applied AI Engineering Partner will be on the ground at three AWS Summit events, ready to sit down with enterprise and public sector leaders who are done with pilots and ready to take generative and agentic AI live.

The AWS Summit series is where enterprise technology leaders gather to see what is possible on AWS. As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and one of 11 inaugural AWS Pattern Partners selected from the AWS Partner Network, Robots & Pencils is the nimble, high-velocity alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Every engagement starts with the outcome the client needs and earns it with evidence. Velocity Pods, Robots & Pencils’ atomic delivery units, are small teams of senior practitioners that take AI solutions from concept to production on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore in weeks, compared to 6 to 12 months with a traditional systems integrator. 

“AWS has built the full-stack agentic AI infrastructure. The technology is ready. What we do is put it to work fast,” said Adrian Bird, VP of AWS Partnership at Robots & Pencils. “We work with your teams to build the business architecture that takes enterprise AI live before the next board meeting.”

“Enterprises don’t need another aircraft carrier full of consultants in the AI era,” said Jeff Kirk, EVP of Applied AI at Robots & Pencils. “They need a speedboat, a forward deployed team small enough to be surgical, senior enough to build for scale with, and fast enough to prove ROI before the next budget cycle.”

What the Robots & Pencils Builds on AWS 

Agentic AI with AWS is the core of the work. AI agents built on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore that work alongside human teams in live not in a sandbox. 

Cloud Modernization gets organizations off aging infrastructure and onto a serverless, AWS-native foundation built to scale, not just to run. 

Cloud and AI App Development is where engineers and creatives build in the same room, producing cloud-native applications with generative AI in the architecture from day one. 

For enterprise and public sector teams attending any of the three summits, the Robots & Pencils team is ready to talk. 

Schedule time with the Robots & Pencils team:  

• AWS Summit Los Angeles, June 10 

• AWS Summit New York City, June 17 

• AWS Summit Washington, D.C., June 30 – July 1 

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Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable business outcomes, published The Fault Line, a three-part series examining the organizational failures keeping energy AI trapped in perpetual pilot mode. 

Forty percent of utility control rooms will deploy AI-driven operators by 2027, according to Gartner. Yet fewer than seven percent of energy organizations have gone live with even one AI use case, according to IDC and AWS research. The gap between investment and execution continues to widen across the sector. 

The Fault Line argues the problem lives in three specific organizational breakdowns that repeatedly prevent AI from reaching production environments and generating operational learning at scale. Scott Young, EVP of Growth and Strategic Alliances at Robots & Pencils, wrote the series for the energy executive who has approved the budget, built the pilot, and is still waiting for AI to run. 

“Energy executives are moving faster through decisive action that turns AI investment into operational advantage,” said Young. “Every quarter spent in evaluation is a quarter of compounding operational learning moving somewhere else. That is the fault line. And it is solvable.” 

Three Articles. Three Failures. One Compounding Reality. 

Part 1 – Going Live with Energy AI Starts with One Decision. The applications energy executives are waiting on are already ready to deploy. They have been for years. The first article examines the one thing standing between investment and results, and it is not technology. 

Part 2 – Energy AI Operator Trust Is Earned by Design. When AI stalls in the control room, the default explanation is operator resistance. The second article argues that explanation is aimed at the wrong problem entirely and that the organizations making the most progress stopped trying to manage adoption and started doing something else. 

Part 3 – The Energy AI Architecture Decision That Outlasts Every Tool. Most energy organizations are not building AI. They are accumulating it. The third article names the difference between a collection of tools that cannot learn from each other and an architecture that compounds and explains why no one selling AI tools has a financial incentive to close that gap. 

Why This Matters Now 

Investment, urgency, and operational pressure are converging quickly across the industry. The DOE’s Genesis Mission mobilized $293 million to advance AI in grid operations. ERCOT launched a dedicated Enterprise Data and AI organization in January 2026. At the same time, many organizations are adding AI systems faster than they are building the operational foundations required to scale them effectively. 

The Fault Line identifies three areas where that gap consistently appears including executive decision velocity, operator-centered system design, and architectures capable of compounding intelligence across the enterprise. The series also addresses the regulatory and operational realities utility leaders face while advancing AI initiatives within NERC CIP environments. 

Each article stands on its own. Together, the series presents a clear argument for how energy organizations move from isolated pilots to operational AI systems that improve through live deployment. 

“The energy sector is entering a period where AI advantage compounds faster than most executives expect,” Young said. “The organizations deploying now will be operating systems shaped by thousands of hours of real-world learning while others are still refining pilots. The opportunity belongs to the organizations willing to move.” 

Read the Series 

The Fault Line is available now at robotsandpencils.com. Energy executives interested in accelerating AI deployment and operational readiness can request an AI Briefing. 

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Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable business outcomes, today announced the appointment of Saul Delage as SVP, Client Partner, Retail and Consumer Goods (RCG). Based in Chicago, he brings 30 years of experience building executive partnerships and driving growth across some of the most recognized names in digital transformation. Delage joins a proven leadership team at Robots & Pencils with extensive experience delivering for more than 100 of the world’s most recognized consumer brands, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies.

The appointment is a deliberate move. Robots & Pencils is investing with intention in Retail and Consumer Goods, including CPG, eCommerce, Restaurants & Everyday Essentials, and Retail, an industry under mounting pressure to move from AI experimentation into generative and agentic AI that performs in production and delivers measurable business outcomes. Delage will lead client relationships across the vertical, helping enterprise leaders get more from their AI investments and more from their investments in AWS, while strengthening the company’s presence in key markets and building closer, more embedded partnerships with clients.

The Right Leader for the Moment

“Saul is the kind of leader clients trust before the contract is signed and can’t imagine working without after,” said Len Pagon, CEO of Robots & Pencils. “He has worked alongside some of our team before. He knows how we operate, and he knows this vertical inside out. Retail and Consumer Goods is a large growing industry vertical for us, and we went out and got the right leader.”

A Career Built on Trust and Delivery

Delage arrives with a career forged across Cognizant, Isobar, Havas, Razorfish, and Fry, where he built high-performing growth teams, secured long-term relationships with Fortune 500 companies, and earned a reputation as one of the most technically fluent executives in the industry, equally effective in the boardroom and in the details of delivery.

His hire reflects the company tenet that winning in Retail and Consumer Goods requires leadership with deep business experience, the technical fluency to speak the language of AI, and the delivery discipline to back it up.

“Retail and Consumer Goods businesses have made significant investments in AI, and too many have little to show for it in production,” said Delage. “Robots & Pencils builds enterprise AI systems — generative, agentic, and production-ready — that move fast and tie directly to revenue and customer experience. That is exactly what this industry needs right now, and Robots & Pencils is built to deliver it.”

Built on AWS. Driven by Outcomes.

Robots & Pencils is unabashedly aligned with AWS and is building its Retail and Consumer Goods vertical around that conviction. The goal is helping enterprise leaders drive measurable business outcomes on AWS, from first deployment to full-scale production. For AWS co-sell teams and enterprise leaders who need a partner that moves fast and delivers, that commitment is the differentiator.

Ready to move from AI experimentation to AI execution? Request an AI Briefing.

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 Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable business outcomes, today announced the appointment of Adrian Bird as Vice President of AWS Partnership.  

The timing is deliberate. Bird joins as the company deepens its investment in the AWS ecosystem. He will lead the company’s AWS Partner strategy and execution, expanding joint customer engagement, and strengthening alignment with AWS teams. 

Two Decades of AWS and IBM Partnership Leadership 

Bird brings direct experience from AWS, where he was Partner Sales Leader from 2020 to 2026. In that role, he managed comprehensive channel strategy and partner program initiatives across ISVs, global systems integrators, and technology partners, collaborating with AWS field sellers across regions and industries to support joint go-to-market initiatives. He built partner success frameworks that drove exceptional year-over-year growth in partner revenue, created revenue operations tools adopted across multiple AWS business units, and led initiatives that significantly expanded the security partner ecosystem. He earned AWS’s Innovation All-Star recognition in 2024.  

Prior to AWS, Bird spent fifteen years at IBM in progressively senior partnership and alliance roles. He grew the Watson Media worldwide partner channel from inception to more than a third of business unit revenue within two years, scaled the IBM Commerce partner business several-fold over four years, and led the integration of Sterling Commerce’s partner ecosystem following its acquisition, retaining the vast majority of partners while substantially growing combined revenue. He is a recipient of IBM’s Industry Solutions Successful Partnering Award and the IBM 100% Club. 

Accelerating AWS Partnership Strategy 

“Adrian has spent his career building partner ecosystems that generate real, compounding results,” said Scott Young, EVP of Growth and Strategic Partnerships. “Having led partner strategy inside AWS, he knows exactly how AWS field teams operate and what it takes to be a partner they actively bring into deals. That perspective, combined with his track record of execution, is precisely what we need right now. Clients who need enterprise AI at speed will benefit directly from what Adrian builds.” 

“We are unabashedly all in on AWS,” said Len Pagon, CEO of Robots & Pencils. “We have tremendous traction and momentum. Adrian is another key investment in taking our AWS partnership further, faster.” 

Driving Enterprise AI Adoption and AWS Consumption at Scale 

Bird’s appointment builds on recent company milestones including earning AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner status, selection as one of 11 inaugural AWS Pattern Partners globally, and the launch of its Studio for Generative and Agentic AI in Bellevue near AWS headquarters. The company is also actively engaged with AWS through its collaboration with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to support joint enterprise initiatives. Bird’s mandate is clear: align partnership strategy with Robots & Pencils’ ability to deploy AI into production at speed and drive measurable AWS consumption and customer value at scale. 

“Robots & Pencils has built what most companies only claim to have. They have the engineering depth, a proven record of deploying AI into production at speed, and the scale to serve enterprise clients globally,” said Bird. “The AWS partnership is the force multiplier that connects those capabilities to the clients who need them most. My job is to make sure that potential becomes performance, for Robots & Pencils, for AWS, and for the clients we serve together.” 

Request an AI briefing to evaluate how applied AI can deliver velocity and impact within your organization.

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Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable outcomes in complex institutional environments, today announced that its CEO, Leonard Pagon, will participate in a panel discussion at the ASU-GSV Summit, a premier global event focused on the intersection of education, technology, and workforce innovation.

As a seasoned operator who has built and scaled technology-driven companies, Pagon will share practical insights on how universities are operationalizing AI across institutional systems while maintaining governance, security, and accessibility.

What Education Leaders Will Learn at ASU-GSV

The panel discussion, “ASU CreateAI Platform. An Enterprise Strategy for Designing AI for Everyone at Scale,” will take place Tuesday, April 14, 2026, from 10:00 to 10:40 AM at the Manchester Grand Hyatt.

Pagon will be joined by Kyle Bowen, Deputy CIO, Arizona State University; Matthew Gee, Director, U.S. Program Data, Gates Foundation; Stephanie Khurana, CEO, Axim Collaborative; and Elizabeth Reilley, Chief AI Officer, University of North Carolina. The panel will be moderated by Lev Gonick, Enterprise CIO, Arizona State University.

The session centers on the real-world mechanics of enterprise AI in higher education, including:

• How institutions connect AI across SIS, LMS, CRM, and operational systems
• Governance models that allow rapid experimentation without losing institutional control
• Real examples that enable non-technical users to design and deploy AI solutions
• The growing role of agentic AI in strengthening institutional resilience and operational efficiency

“A lot of AI activity in higher education is happening at the use case level, which creates fragmentation across the institution.” said Pagon. “The real shift is building platforms that bring those efforts together and make AI work inside everyday institutional constraints. The impact shows up when AI moves from pilots into production systems that perform, with the right guardrails in place.”

Scaling AI Across the University with Governance and Control

Robots & Pencils has worked with with Arizona State University since 2019 on cloud-native architecture, platform modernization, and applied AI initiatives that improve the student experience and strengthen institutional operations. This collaboration has produced practical insight into how universities move from small pilots to enterprise AI programs through platforms that support rapid innovation while maintaining strong governance, security, and accessibility standards.

From Experimentation to Enterprise AI

Institutions are increasingly looking to AI to improve student support, reduce manual processes, and extend staff capacity without increasing headcount. The ASU-GSV Summit brings together entrepreneurs, investors, and education leaders who are shaping the future of learning and workforce development through technology.

Higher education leaders are moving quickly to modernize operations, improve student experience, and prepare graduates for an AI-driven economy. Enterprise AI platforms give universities a structured way to design, deploy, and govern AI solutions across departments while enabling faculty, staff, and researchers to use AI in their day-to-day work with security, compliance, and accessibility built in. This approach enables institutions to scale AI in higher education with clarity, control, and speed.

Robots & Pencils team members will be onsite throughout the April 12 through April 15 event. Education leaders attending ASU-GSV can connect with Robots & Pencils to explore how enterprise AI platforms and applied AI solutions scale across institutions, edtech platforms, publishers, and workforce organizations.

Schedule time with the Robots & Pencils team at ASU-GSV.

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Across higher education, AI is no longer theoretical. It shows up in advising offices, finance teams, registrar systems, and IT backlogs every day. Not long ago, the conversations felt divisive. Leaders debated risk, approved tools, and moved forward with cautious optimism.  

Today, many of those same leaders are sitting with a different feeling. The systems technically work. Progress feels uneven. Accountability feels scattered. And no one can say with certainty whether the institution is truly advancing or simply carrying new technology without a clear owner of the outcome.  

That uncertainty now lives with presidents, provosts, and CIOs expected to defend AI investment, manage institutional risk, and show results inside universities designed to move carefully, by consensus, and without urgency. The technology is working. The institution is not.  

The gap between those two facts is structural. 

Today, Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable outcomes in complex institutional environments, announces the release of The Institutional Intelligence Crisis, a three-part research series examining why AI adoption fails at the departmental level and what senior leadership must address to change that trajectory. 

Read The Institutional Intelligence Crisis series. 

Drawing on research and operational experience across universities and complex organizations where AI adoption is already underway, the series identifies a set of recurring patterns that appear once AI moves beyond experimentation and into daily operations. 

The series is authored by Jess Martin, Principal Delivery Manager at Robots & Pencils, and is written for university presidents, provosts, CIOs, and boards of trustees. It treats AI adoption as an institutional design challenge, not a technology procurement problem, and focuses on the post-pilot phase: the period where accountability structures and human dynamics determine whether AI becomes a reliable capability or quietly rots. 

“AI doesn’t create accountability problems.” says Martin. ”It exposes the ones you already have.” 

Why AI Governance Fails in Higher Education: Three Failures That Compound 

The series is built around three failures that compound in sequence: 

• The Intelligence Leak (Part 1): When institutions fail to provide operational pathways for AI, high-performing staff build their own, exporting institutional problem-solving logic to personal accounts at third-party vendors. The sector now calls this Shadow AI. The university does not get smarter. The vendor does. When institutions leave a gap between policy and practical access to AI tools, staff close that gap themselves, often outside the visibility of supervisors or institutional governance. 

• The Redistribution of Expertise (Part 2): AI makes institutional expertise portable. The specialized knowledge that senior staff in advising centers, registrar offices, and financial aid departments have spent decades accumulating and making indispensable can now be replicated by a junior colleague and a well-prompted AI. What leadership often experiences as operational friction is frequently a rational response from professionals whose expertise has defined their role inside the institution. 

• The Brittle System (Part 3): When no one is accountable for output quality, performance degrades without announcement. Errors become plausible enough that staff quietly work around them rather than report them. The system continues running while confidence in the results quietly erodes. In many institutions, leaders lack a clear view into whether AI systems are improving outcomes or introducing new operational risk. 

Higher education leaders are encouraged to read the full series and engage with a data-driven perspective grounded in accountability, execution, and institutional readiness. 

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Location: Tempe, Arizona (main campus), with additional campuses across Arizona and global online presence 

Customer Profile: Leading public research university serving thousands of students and faculty members, focused on innovation in education technology, digital transformation, academic credentialing, learning management systems, student engagement platforms, and AI-powered support systems 

Customer Challenge

In 2023, Arizona State University modernized its course provisioning system to streamline enrollment processes, reducing delays and minimizing the need for manual intervention at the start of each semester. Robots & Pencils partnered with ASU to build the Canvas Enrollment System (CES), a modern Canvas LMS integration that automates course creation and roster syncing. This new system reduced wait times that occurred previously from more than three days to less than 30 minutes and decreased manual requests by 40%, saving hundreds of administrative hours each term.

Robots & Pencils’ Solution

By modernizing the course enrollment process using AWS managed services, including Amazon SQS, SNS, Step Functions, Lambda, OpenSearch, and DynamoDB, the organization achieved a remarkable reduction in processing time from three days to only 30 minutes.  

• Amazon SQS and SNS enable reliable, asynchronous communication across components, eliminating processing bottlenecks and ensuring seamless handling of large enrollment volumes.  

• AWS Step Functions coordinate and monitor the end-to-end workflow, improving transparency, error handling, and operational resilience.  

• AWS Lambda delivers compute power on demand, automatically scaling to meet workload spikes without provisioning or maintaining servers.  

• Amazon DynamoDB provides a low-latency, fully managed NoSQL database for high-speed data access, enabling near-instant retrieval and updates of student and course records.  

• Amazon OpenSearch supports fast, flexible search and analytics, allowing administrators to instantly view enrollment progress and gain actionable insights.  

Results & Benefits

The new event-driven, serverless architecture replaced a batch-based legacy system with a scalable, resilient, and highly automated solution.  

• Reduced processing time by more than 99% moving from three days to 30 minutes and enabling near real-time student onboarding  

• Increased scalability and reliability, allowing the system to handle thousands of concurrent enrollments during peak periods with no downtime.  

• Decreased operational costs through serverless compute and managed services that minimize infrastructure maintenance.  

• Enhanced data visibility and decision-making, empowering staff with real-time reporting and faster issue resolution.  

By leveraging AWS’s cloud-native capabilities, ASU has transformed its legacy process into an intelligent, automated, and scalable system that advances institutional growth and optimizes operations in service of enhancing the student experience.   

“The new Canvas Enrollment System brings real speed, clarity and reliability to a process that is central to student success. This transformation reflects our commitment to innovation on AWS and how we can collaborate with teams like Robots & Pencils to make improvements to core systems that empower our teams to deliver an exceptional student experience with efficiency and confidence.”  

Kyle Bowen, Deputy CIO, Arizona State University 

About Arizona State University

Arizona State University, ranked the No. 1 “Most Innovative School” in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for 11 years in succession, has forged the model for a New American University by operating on the principles that learning is a personal and original journey for each student; that they thrive on experience and that the process of discovery cannot be bound by traditional academic disciplines. Through innovation and a commitment to accessibility, ASU has drawn pioneering researchers to its faculty even as it expands opportunities for qualified students. 

About Robots & Pencils

Robots & Pencils is an Applied AI Engineering Partner that builds AI systems designed for enterprise velocity and measurable business impact. With delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, the company combines world-class UX with elite engineering talent for rapid, enterprise-grade delivery. Founded in 2009, Robots & Pencils has earned the trust of leaders in Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing industries, gaining a reputation as a high-velocity alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Robots & Pencils is an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and one of the 11 inaugural AWS Pattern Partners, selected to help define how enterprise AI systems are productized, deployed, and scaled through AWS Marketplace.

Learn more about Robots & Pencils’ solutions for Education.

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Robots & Pencils, an applied AI engineering partner known for high-velocity delivery and measurable business outcomes, today announced the appointment of Jason Lacy as Client Partner, Education. Lacy will lead the company’s education vertical, expanding its work across the full education ecosystem.

Explore how Robots & Pencils accelerates AI and cloud modernization in higher education.

Strengthening Leadership Across the Education Ecosystem

Education has been a core focus for Robots & Pencils since its earliest days. Lacy’s appointment strengthens that commitment with dedicated leadership grounded in deep sector knowledge, platform expertise, and enterprise execution.

“Jason has a deep passion for education and brings decades of experience delivering outstanding results and outcomes for education clients,” said Len Pagon, CEO of Robots & Pencils. “He brings a rare blend of market leadership, real education expertise, and technical depth. He understands how institutions help students and enable faculty, how platforms scale, and how to turn AI strategy into production systems that perform. Education leaders need partners who combine ambition with discipline. Jason brings that balance, and it elevates what we can deliver across the sector.”

Lacy’s 30 years of experience spans global partnerships, enterprise technology strategy, and revenue-aligned growth. Most recently, as Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships at Learnosity, he led a worldwide ecosystem representing a significant share of organizational revenue across assessment, learning technology, and workforce certification platforms. He built and scaled partner programs, advanced complex integrations, and aligned commercial strategy with product innovation to drive sustained growth.

Earlier in his career, Lacy expanded strategic partnership practices at Unicon and strengthened relationships across major publishers, platforms, and institutional stakeholders. With a foundation in software engineering and system architecture, he evaluates integration pathways with precision and translates complex technical capabilities into enterprise value. He has advised institutions across public, private, and online sectors, edtech platforms and publishing organizations on digital transformation, ecosystem strategy, and outcome-based modernization initiatives.

Focused Leadership for AI and Cloud Modernization in Education

In his role, Lacy will guide education clients as they modernize legacy infrastructure, strengthen data foundations, and operationalize artificial intelligence within accountable, enterprise-grade environments.

“Education institutions carry both public trust and generational responsibility,” said Lacy. “Innovation must move forward, but it must do so responsibly. The right technology strengthens operational performance while keeping student success at the center.”

AI Patterns Accelerate Responsible AI Adoption in Education

Robots & Pencils’ AI Pattern framework makes this possible with velocity and impact. This structured, repeatable solution model combines proven architecture with use-case-specific configurations to compress delivery timelines from months to weeks.

“When I looked at Robots & Pencils’ AI Pattern approach, I immediately saw its relevance for education,” said Lacy. “Education leaders operate within rigorous governance and risk frameworks. They need progress they can trust. AI Patterns provide a disciplined, repeatable foundation that allows institutions to move quickly on targeted priorities while maintaining control.” 

Robots & Pencils views this early traction as the catalyst for sustained partnership, enabling institutions to expand AI capabilities through phased modernization strategies that advance enrollment growth, student retention, student success analytics, academic operations, enterprise data strategy, and secure adoption.

As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Pattern Partner, Robots & Pencils plays a guiding role in defining how enterprise AI systems are productized and scaled. That experience strengthens the company’s ability to bring structured, production-ready AI systems to complex institutional environments.

A Longstanding Commitment to Education Innovation

“Everything we build begins with the belief that the best AI systems emerge when engineering discipline meets human-centered design,” said Pagon. “Education sits at the intersection of mission and modernization. With Jason leading our education vertical, we are strengthening our ability to help institutions scale AI responsibly while staying true to the people they serve.”

Robots & Pencils has partnered with education institutions and platforms for well over a decade, modernizing legacy systems, launching cloud-native products, and building digital experiences used by millions of learners. Lacy’s appointment reinforces the company’s long-term investment in education and its commitment to helping leaders translate AI ambition into secure, scalable systems that perform in production.

Education continues to evolve. Robots & Pencils is building the AI and cloud foundations that enable that progress, with Jason Lacy helping guide the way.

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