Robots & Pencils Enriches Studio for Generative and Agentic AI with Addition of Brendan Flynn as SVP, Strategy
Robots & Pencils
Flynn brings two decades of large-scale product engineering and delivery leadership, with a track record of building the operating model that lets enterprise AI scale.
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.”
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.”
Robots & Pencils Appoints Jansen Meyers Senior Vice President of Operations
Robots & Pencils
New executive hire deepens the operational bench behind Robots & Pencils’ AI outcomes as the company scales its next stage of high-velocity growth.
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.
RoboCon 26: How Robots & Pencils Turned a Spark into a Surge
Christina Morello
A fire needs three things: something to strike it, something to feed it, and something worth burning for. Robots & Pencils spent six weeks on the first, three days in a Cleveland skyscraper on the second, and it’s building the third right now. We call the whole arc RoboCon 2026: Rise of the Agents, and if you were anywhere near downtown Cleveland the week of July 21st, you felt it.
This is the first of many stories we’ll tell about what happened here. Before we get to the pods, the points, and the people who pulled all-nighters, it’s worth answering the plain questions. Who did this, what actually happened, when, where, and why any of it mattered. Three phases carry that story: Spark lit the competition; Ignite brought it together in Cleveland, and Surge is the follow-through happening right now.
What is RoboCon?
RoboCon 26 is Robots & Pencils’ internal AI competition, built to transform how we work with our clients and each other. Our CEO Len Pagon kicked things off on June 12th with 56 leaders from across the company.
“Most companies are still figuring out how to start. We are already doing it. We design the architecture that takes AI from a demo into the actual work of the business. That is harder than it sounds. Most cannot. We can and we do.”
That gap, between demoing AI and actually running a business on it, is the whole reason RoboCon exists. Pagon had the data to prove it, a six-level AI proficiency ladder gleaned from usage and a proprietary assessment tool. It showed exactly how and where the company could accelerate and codify its generative and agentic AI capabilities across every single current and future employee. “The pace is fast because the window is now,” Pagon told the room, “not next quarter, not another planning cycle.”
So he picked roughly a quarter of the company, the leaders who could carry the change back to their teams, split them into seven pods of about eight people each, and told them to compete.
Spark: The Competition
Spark ran six weekly challenges, and each one moved the pods a step further down the same road: start by setting a shared culture baseline in the newly written Pencil Way, then build something real with the tools, then improve it, then apply it to actual client work. Partway through the six weeks, the competition stopped belonging only to the seven pods. Spark opened up to the whole company, a cohort of allies, and the job was to mentor them through the similar tasks the pod had already worked through. Their learning and their work counted toward their pod’s score. One rule sat above all the scoring: “Client work comes first,” Pagon told everyone. “That if you ever have to choose between working for our client, or you got to do this challenge, the client comes first…always!”
Ignite: Three Days in Cleveland
Six weeks of remote sprinting funneled into three days in person, July 21st through 23rd. Jeff Kirk, EVP of Applied AI, set the tone once everyone was on site.
“It’s time to get into ultra-learning mode,” he said. “To work backwards from our most important customer outcomes and continue to incorporate AI agents into our professional services motion.” He pushed the room toward something harder than a workshop agenda. “Use radical candor with your colleagues and solve some of the most critical challenges that we’re facing on a day-to-day basis as we innovate on behalf of our clients – we transfer our know-how to our clients as a result of Robots & Pencils working with them.”
The three days played out exactly that tension between celebration and work. A championship reception opened things on July 21st, in Pagon’s own backyard. The next two days filled Key Tower’s meeting rooms with keynotes, breakout sessions, and afternoon hackathons, where seven pods turned six weeks of practice into something they could stand behind. Stay tuned for individual and pod stories.
Time for hot dogs, a ball game, and each other.
Surge: Bringing it Home
It would be easy to read Ignite as the climax of the story. It was the culmination of Spark, no question. But Pagon frames it as the first 2 phases as preparation for the most important phase, not an ending. Ignite closed with a personal commitment from every participant: one shift they were making, a few ideas for their team, and a 30, 60, and 90-day plan to make it stick. Read a handful of them back-to-back and the range says more about Surge than any recap could.
“RoboCon reinforced something for me,” said Kristy Andersen, senior delivery manager. “Individual AI fluency is the floor. Organizational AI capability is where things accelerate and impact compounds.”
Pagon called RoboCon an investment in our people and the company, the kind that doesn’t pay off in three days. It pays off in what people do with what they learned once the reception ends and the ballgame’s over. That work is Surge. It’s already underway, and it’s the story we’ll keep telling from here.
The Robots & Pencils’ Talent Perspective: What Recruiters Look for in a Resume
Madeleine Barthelmess
Robots & Pencils’ Head of Talent, Madeleine Barthelmess, breaks down what recruiters actually need from a modern resume, and where the real story is getting lost.
I hear this almost every week. Someone tells me they’ve applied to hundreds of jobs, heard nothing back, and blamed the ATS. Maybe you’ve said something similar yourself. My resume never reached a human. The AI rejected me. If only I had the right keywords. As Head of Talent at Robots & Pencils, I read resumes for a living, and here’s what might surprise you. Most resumes aren’t rejected because of AI. They’re rejected because they don’t tell a compelling story.
Here’s the short version. AI isn’t deciding who gets hired. People are. Yes, we use applicant tracking systems. Yes, technology helps me process thousands of applications. But I still open the file. I still read the first few lines. I still make the call. If your resume isn’t landing interviews, the fix isn’t a new set of keywords. It’s a better story.
The 75 Percent Myth Has No Study Behind It
I’ve spoken to candidates who have applied to 500 jobs, even 1,000. Then I ask one question. How many interviews have you gotten? Usually the answer is somewhere between zero and five. That tells me the problem isn’t the ATS. The problem is strategy.
The claim that three out of four resumes get auto-rejected before a human ever sees them shows up everywhere, from career coaches to LinkedIn posts. It traces back to a 2012 marketing claim from a resume-optimization company that went out of business the following year, not a peer-reviewed study or an industry survey. I use applicant tracking systems every day, and what they actually do is organize and rank applications. They don’t run a silent purge on formatting or keyword scores alone.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. If you believe your resume vanished into a black box, you’ll keep tweaking keywords. If you understand that a person like me is going to open that file, you’ll start writing for that person.
Your Resume Is a Marketing Document, Not a Biography
Here’s something I wish every job seeker understood. Your resume is not your biography. It’s not supposed to document every job you’ve ever had. Think about Apple. When Apple launches a new product, they don’t spend an hour talking about every device they’ve ever built. They focus on what matters to today’s customer. Your resume should do exactly the same thing. Every line should answer the same question. Why should I interview you for this role? If something doesn’t help answer that, it probably doesn’t belong there.
One mistake I see constantly is candidates trying to include everything. Every internship, every volunteer project, every certification they’ve ever earned. More information doesn’t make your resume stronger. Relevant information does. I’d rather review one focused page than three pages filled with information that has nothing to do with the role you’re applying for.
What Recruiters Scan for in the First Few Seconds
I don’t spend minutes carefully reading every resume, at least not at first. I’m scanning for clarity. An eye-tracking study conducted for TheLadders found recruiters spend roughly six to eight seconds on that initial scan, and more recent research puts the number closer to eleven. Either way, I have seconds, not minutes, to find three things.
Can I immediately understand who you are?
Can I see what value you bring?
Can I quickly connect your experience to the position I’m hiring for?
If I have to work too hard to figure that out, you’ve already made the process harder for both of us. When you’re competing with hundreds of other applicants, clarity becomes your biggest advantage.
Where AI Actually Belongs in Your Job Search
Can ChatGPT help you write your resume? Absolutely. Should it write your entire resume? Absolutely not. AI is an incredible assistant. It can help identify important skills, rewrite bullet points, improve grammar, and organize your ideas. But it shouldn’t replace your own voice. The more resumes I read, the easier it becomes to recognize the ones written almost entirely by AI, not because they’re bad, but because they all sound the same. Everyone is using AI to try to stand out, and they’re accidentally making themselves sound identical. Ironically, the candidates who actually stand out are the ones who use AI as an editor, not as the author. Your story still has to sound like you.
Your Resume’s Real Job
If there’s one thing I want you to remember, it’s this. Your resume doesn’t get you hired. It gets you a conversation. That’s its job. So stop trying to outsmart AI. Stop trying to game the ATS. Instead, write a resume that makes it easy for another human being to understand who you are and why you’re the right person for the role. No matter how much the tools change, one thing hasn’t changed. People still hire people.
I go deeper on all of this in the full episode above, including the exact professional summary line I want every job seeker to delete immediately.
Does AI reject resumes before a recruiter sees them?
No. I use applicant tracking systems to rank and organize applications, not to reject them silently. I’m the one making the hiring decision, not the algorithm.
Why do I keep getting rejected after applying to hundreds of jobs?
Usually it’s strategy, not the ATS. I’ve talked to candidates who applied to 1,000 jobs and got five interviews. Applying broadly without tailoring your resume to each role’s actual requirements produces a high application count and a low interview count.
Should I use ChatGPT to write my resume?
Use it to edit, not to author. I can tell almost immediately when a resume was written entirely by AI, and not because it’s bad. It’s because it sounds like everyone else’s. Let AI tighten your bullet points. Don’t let it replace your voice.
What should a professional summary actually say?
Skip “seeking an opportunity to utilize my skills.” I already know your objective is the job. Use the summary to tell me who you are, what problems you solve, and what you’re known for.
Two trades, one person, the character in the middle.
Twenty years ago a parent told their kid not to major in art. Ten years ago they said it about English. Five years ago the script tightened to anything that didn’t end in -ology or -engineering. STEM was the moat. STEM was the parachute. STEM was the answer to every dinner-table question your kid was too polite to ask out loud.
You know how this ends.
I’ve been watching it end in slow motion for eighteen months. The CS grads I talk to are anxious in a way the comp lit grads aren’t. Not because the comp lit grads have it figured out. They don’t. Nobody does. But they were never promised the floor wouldn’t move. The CS grads were told it was bedrock. Then somebody started writing code at the speed of thought, and the bedrock turned out to be a Jenga tower with a six-week release cycle.
The irony is thick enough to spread on toast. We trained a generation to speak the language of machines. The machines turned around and learned the language of people. If a screenwriter pitched that arc, the room would tell them to dial it back.
The company whose name explained everything
I want to tell you a story about a company I ran, because I think it explains what’s actually happening, and what’s coming for the people who were paying attention.
In 2014, I brought a Canadian agency called Robots & Pencils down to the States. I was CEO of the US operation. We grew thirty-four hundred percent in eighteen months, finished the year as the 35th fastest-growing tech company in the country, and most of the press I gave at the time was about the numbers. The numbers weren’t the story. The name was.
Robots & Pencils. The name was lifted, more or less, from C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture on the Two Cultures. Snow’s argument that the sciences and the humanities had drifted into separate languages that could no longer talk to each other, and that the gap between them was the central problem of modern life. He wrote it about Cambridge dining halls. We built it as an agency.
The robots were the developers. People who could build the thing. The pencils were the designers. People who could see the thing before it existed. Two trades, two trainings, two languages, two halves of any product worth shipping. We had robots. We had pencils. We were good at both.
And the founder, who was (ironically, beautifully, to his own ongoing amusement) robot #1, was the most insistent voice in the building that good products are always visioned pencils first. You can’t bolt art on at the end. Try it and the seams show forever. The most technical man in the room kept telling the room to start with the drawing.
Two people who were already the bridge
He didn’t found the company alone. His wife was the pencil to his robot, a brilliant artist, an interior designer with the eye that finds the wrong wall and tells you why, an accountant sharp enough to serve as the company’s CFO. He was the technical man with a love of art he couldn’t fake. She was the artist with the operational backbone most companies wish they could hire. Each of them stretched toward the center. Each of them was already half ampersand before the company had a name.
That’s why it worked. The two people at the top of the org chart were the bridge they were asking the rest of us to build. You felt it the second you walked in. It pulled in robots who suspected they were also a little bit pencil, pencils who knew they were also a little bit robot, and the people who’d never picked a side at all. The brand wasn’t a logo. The brand was the marriage.
But the ampersand was the entire reason the company existed.
The rarest person in any room
You know who I mean. The dev who notices the kerning. The designer who reads the API docs because she actually wants to know what’s possible. The one who drops #picky into a Slack design review without apologizing for it, because they know the small thing is the whole thing. The person who can sit between two rooms that don’t speak each other’s language and translate. Not the words. The intent. They were rare. We’d interview a hundred people and find one. They commanded a premium because the value of a translator scales with the distance between the parties, and the distance between an engineer and a designer in most companies is bigger than the distance between Calgary and the moon.
The ampersand people weren’t better at either trade. They were the only ones in the room who saw both trades as the same problem from different chairs. They were almost mythological. We named the company after them.
What AI actually does for the bridge person
Here is what I didn’t see coming, even though I should have. AI doesn’t pick a side. It never had to. It doesn’t just close the gap between the dev and the designer. It closes the gap inside the bridge person, the small and humiliating gap between what they could always see and what they could actually produce. The designer who knew exactly how the API should work but couldn’t write the call. She can write the call now. The dev who saw the right pixel grid but couldn’t move pixels. He can move pixels now. The ampersand always saw both ends of the bridge. Now they can walk it. If Jobs called the computer a bicycle for the mind, AI just strapped rocket engines to the sides.
You want proof? A 23-year-old amateur mathematician named Liam Price, no PhD, no faculty appointment, no research lab, used ChatGPT to solve an open problem that had been sitting on the shelf for sixty years. Erdős Problem #1196, from primitive set theory. Sixty years. The kind of problem that gets named after the person who posed it because nobody alive could finish it. Price finished it. And then Terence Tao, the Fields Medalist, the person most mathematicians would rank as the best living mind in the discipline, verified the proof and co-authored the resulting paper. A 23-year-old with curiosity and a chatbot sat down at the same table as the greatest mathematician of his generation. Not because AI solved the problem for him. Because AI let him hold the conversation long enough to solve it himself. That’s the ampersand. That’s curiosity with tooling that doesn’t punish you for not having the right letters after your name.
The bridge people are about to multiply. Not because the trait gets more common. That takes generations, and curiosity in two directions has never been on any roadmap I’ve ever seen. But the trait finally has tooling that doesn’t punish it for refusing to specialize. For thirty years we paid the ampersand person less because they weren’t “really” a developer or “really” a designer. We tolerated them because they made the meetings work. They are about to inherit the building.
And the lesson runs wider than design and code, because the ampersand was never really about design and code. The ampersand is about being curious in two directions at once. It’s about being the kind of person who refuses to pick a side because they can’t stand to leave the other side ignorant. That’s not a job description. That’s a humanities education.
Read carefully. Argue clearly. Hold a contradiction without flinching. Care about the answer even when nobody’s grading you. Do the hard thing quietly. Take care of the person next to you before you take care of yourself. Carry two trades at once and a third in reserve. Say what you mean and mean what you say. It doesn’t sound like much. It also doesn’t fit in a job code, which is why we’ve been quietly defunding it for forty years. It didn’t return on a single-year horizon, and the only people who tried to defend it sounded like they were defending themselves.
I’ll tell you where I learned all of it, because it wasn’t school. It was my parents and the people they surrounded us with. A father who came up through the Green Berets and ran a house on the principle that you say what you mean and you mean what you say. A mother and a community who treated curiosity as a chore you didn’t get to skip. Nobody handed me a syllabus on holding a contradiction. I watched the adults around me do it at the dinner table. I graduated into the internet in 1985 and was running an ISP a decade later. That sharpened the tools. The tools came from home.
That’s the part the system can’t replicate and won’t admit. The ampersand is mostly raised, not taught. The people who saw this moment coming were mostly the ones we wouldn’t fund. And the ones who can step into it now were mostly raised by people who didn’t need a funding line to know it mattered.
The skill with a 25-year half-life
Framework knowledge has a half-life of about two and a half years. That’s IBM’s number for specialist technical skills, and it tracks with what the National Academy of Engineering has been saying for twenty years. By contrast, the half-life of a humanities education runs closer to twenty-five. The argument structure Aristotle taught is still the argument structure that wins. The people who can build and fix the machine will be needed for as long as there’s a machine. The play isn’t picking a side. It’s picking one discipline that ages well and one that compounds fast, and refusing to let either atrophy.
Walk into a room where the pencils and the robots are really cooking and you can feel it through the floor. The designers sketch faster than the engineers can build. The engineers build faster than the designers can sketch. The ampersand is at the whiteboard turning the sketch into a system and the system into a sketch, and everybody in the room is operating one cognitive notch above where they could operate alone. That hum used to be the rarest sound in tech. We’re about to hear it everywhere. In classrooms, in clinics, in non-profits, in offices that have been quietly dying for a decade because the bridge person never showed up.
Don’t mistake this for triumphalism. The reversal doesn’t make the humanities grad rich and the CS grad poor. It rearranges who has leverage, which is a different and harder problem. The CS grads who pair their craft with the human stuff, curiosity in two directions, care for the person on the other side of the screen, are going to be fine. The humanities grads who learned to type sentences but never learned to sit with a real problem until it broke? They’re going to wash out the same as anyone. The credential never saved anybody. The skill underneath the credential is the only thing that matters now.
What’s coming is a world where you need both hands. The robot hand and the pencil hand. The technical and the human. The thing the machine can amplify and the thing the machine cannot replace. People who learned only one are about to find themselves doing half a job. People who learned both, the ampersands, the bridge people, the curious-in-two-directions people, are about to find the assignment finally suits them.
The career advice parents need to hear in 2026
I’ll say something with an edge, because I have watched too many parents push too many kids in the wrong direction and I am out of polite ways to put it. Stop telling your daughter to pick something “practical.” There is nothing practical about training her for a job description that will be rewritten before she graduates. Tell her to chase the thing she is actually curious about, and tell her to learn the tools that scale curiosity. That is the practical answer in 2026. Everything else is nostalgia for a stability that was always a marketing slogan.
And tell her to find the room. Find a university, a community, a circle that’s already wired for curiosity in two directions. Humanities and sciences sitting at the same table, AI amplifying both, and credentials that still translate into workforce currency on the other side. Skills, capabilities, and a degree. Not one or the other. Humble plug, because it would be dishonest not to say it: that’s exactly what we’re building at Maryville. An achievement architecture for all of them. Robots, ampersands, and pencils. AI amplifying each one’s curiosity and capabilities. We’re about to show, not tell, what that means. Stay tuned.
The ampersand was always the symbol of the company because it was the symbol of the work. Two trades, one person, one connector character holding the whole sentence together. It was never decoration. It was the structure.
The robots are getting better. The pencils are getting better. But the people who can hold both, who can be technical without losing their humanity, who can be human without abandoning the craft, those people are about to inherit the moment. The ones we underpaid for thirty years because we couldn’t fit them in a column.
Strive to be a little ampersand. Not just the robot. Not just the pencil. The character in the middle that connects them.
That’s the job now. And it’s the abstract of every job that comes after it.
The team Phil wrote about? That’s us. Robots & Pencils has been building at the intersection of technical and human since day one. Request an AI briefing and see what that means for your organization.
About Phil Komarny
Phil Komarny, an award-winning executive, national thought leader, and Chief Future/AI Officer at Maryville University. He led Robots & Pencils as CEO in 2014 and 2015. It’s clear he never stopped thinking about what our name meant.Read more articles by Phil.
Key Takeaways
The “ampersand person” is someone curious in two directions at once — technical and human — and they have always been the most valuable person in the room.
AI doesn’t replace the bridge person. It closes the gap between what they could always see and what they could actually produce.
Framework knowledge has a half-life of roughly two and a half years. The skills underneath a humanities education run closer to twenty-five.
For thirty years we underpaid the generalist because they didn’t fit a job code. That’s about to change.
The practical career move in 2026 is pairing one discipline that ages well with one that compounds fast — and refusing to let either atrophy.
FAQ
What is the ampersand person? Someone who refuses to specialize in just one direction. They can sit between two rooms that don’t speak each other’s language and translate not the words, but the intent.
Why is the Robots & Pencils name significant? The name draws on C.P. Snow’s 1959 Two Cultures lecture — the idea that the sciences and humanities had drifted into separate languages. Robots represented the builders. Pencils represented the visionaries. The ampersand between them was always the point.
How does AI change things for generalists? AI closes the gap between what bridge people could always see and what they could actually produce. The designer who knew how the API should work can now write the call. The developer who saw the right pixel grid can now move pixels.
Is a humanities education still worth it? According to Phil Komarny, yes — more than ever. The argument structure Aristotle taught still wins. The credential doesn’t save anyone, but the skill underneath it compounds in a way technical specialization alone no longer does.
What should parents tell their kids about careers in an AI world? Stop pushing “something practical” defined by yesterday’s job market. Tell them to chase what they’re genuinely curious about and learn the tools that scale curiosity. That is the practical answer in 2026.
Robots & Pencils Appoints Jason Lacy as Client Partner to Lead Education Vertical
Robots & Pencils
Veteran executive brings three decades of experience guiding institutions, edtech platforms, publishers, and workforce organizations through digital transformation and applied AI modernization.
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.
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.
How Applied AI Reduces Cognitive Load and Supports Employee Mental Health
Mary Peake
Some might think mental health in the workplace starts and ends with a meditation app subscription or an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) link. I have been guilty of sharing such solutions in the past with our talent at Robots & Pencils.
Over time, I have come to see how incomplete that framing can be.
Cognitive Load is the Overlooked Driver of Workplace Stress
As I have been growing in my career, and as someone who oversees payroll, benefits, and 401k/RRSP administration for a cross-border team at Robots & Pencils, I am starting to see mental health from a different perspective. I see the cognitive load. The quiet, compounding mental tax created when systems do not talk to each other, processes remain unclear, and routine administrative work slowly becomes a second job.
We live in an era of applied AI, where we are building tools capable of automating what once felt impossible. Yet many employees still experience persistent administrative friction. When a data feed fails, when a vacation request stalls across disconnected platforms, or when an exception requires manual workarounds, the stress that follows is rarely dramatic. It is ambient. It lingers.
It shows up as background noise. Where can I find my paystub? How does my pension match work? Is my family actually covered? These are foundational questions, and when the answers feel uncertain, they pull attention away from the creative and strategic work our teams are here to do. Over time, that uncertainty erodes trust, not just in systems, but in the organization itself.
Where Systems Reliability and Human Care Meet
At Robots & Pencils, we talk about blending the sciences with the humanities. My role often places me directly at that intersection. I act as a human bridge between complex systems and the people who rely on them. Because our internal processes are rarely linear, a personal touch becomes more than a courtesy. It becomes a practical mental health strategy grounded in reliability and clarity.
I have learned that sometimes the most meaningful way I can support the well-being of our team is not by sharing reminders about rest or resilience. It is by reducing the amount of cognitive effort required to navigate everyday work. That might mean using AI tools to build a clearer, more resilient spreadsheet for third-party data uploads, or creating an internal standard operating procedure so critical steps live outside my own memory.
Applied AI Creates the Conditions for Well-Being
By externalizing process knowledge and reducing manual friction, I free up time and attention. That time allows me to personally navigate fragmented systems on behalf of the team, answer payroll questions with confidence, and offer the human service of explanation and reassurance when it matters most.
In that sense, applied AI does not replace care. It creates the conditions for it. When systems are reliable, people can focus. When processes are clear, trust grows. Reliability itself becomes a form of support, and clarity becomes a quiet contributor to mental well-being.
As work becomes more complex, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that design for focus, trust, and human capacity. Applied AI plays a role, not as a replacement for care, but as a way to create the conditions where care can scale. The work begins by asking a simple question: Where could clarity change the experience of work? Request an AI Briefing today.
Key Takeaways
Employee mental health is shaped by everyday systems and processes, not only by wellness benefits.
Cognitive load increases when administrative work becomes fragmented, unclear, or overly manual.
Applied AI helps reduce mental strain by externalizing process knowledge and improving reliability.
Systems that work predictably create trust, which supports focus, creativity, and confidence.
AI creates leverage when it removes friction so people can spend more time on human-centered work.
FAQs
What is cognitive load in the workplace?
Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to complete tasks and manage information. In the workplace, it often increases when systems are fragmented, processes lack clarity, or employees must hold critical steps in memory to ensure work gets done correctly.
How does applied AI support employee mental health?
Applied AI supports employee mental health by reducing administrative friction. When AI helps organize data, clarify processes, and improve reliability, employees spend less mental energy navigating uncertainty and more time focusing on meaningful work.
Can AI replace human support in HR or operations?
AI does not replace human support. It creates conditions where human care is more effective. By handling repetitive or error-prone tasks, AI frees time and attention for explanation, reassurance, and judgment that require a human presence.
What role do systems play in employee trust?
Reliable systems signal care and competence. When processes work consistently and information is easy to access, employees feel supported and confident that the organization is looking out for them.
When Tech Meets Heart: Holidays at Robots & Pencils
Madeleine Barthelmess
At Robots & Pencils, we build smart systems for the human world and during the holidays, that human side really comes alive.
This season, our global team turned kindness into action with Robots & Pencils Fit Bingo: Doing Good Edition, sparking generosity, creativity, and connection across time zones.
Our people:
Gave back to food banks, children’s hospitals, veteran and animal rescue organizations
Volunteered in their communities and supported causes close to their hearts
Welcomed new babies into the R&P family
Adopted dogs and brought home new puppies
Traveled the world on holiday adventures and shared snapshots from near and far
Rode for cancer research, coached kids’ teams, and created unforgettable moments for families
Brought creativity to life from AI-powered potion kits to festive baking experiments
While some of our team was on the ground at AWS re:Invent exploring the future of cloud and AI, others were building something just as important: connection, empathy, and community.
Different countries. Different traditions. One shared mindset.
Innovation matters, but people are the point.
Grateful for every teammate who made this season meaningful. This is what it looks like when technology meets imagination and heart.
Happy Holidays from Robots & Pencils.
If technology with heart resonates with you, there is a place for you here. We are scaling fast and looking for curious, kind, and ambitious people. Join the team and build with us.
