James Schlauch enlisted in the Nevada Army National Guard the day before his birthday in December 2002, deployed to Afghanistan in 2005, and volunteered as a door gunner mid-tour after his unit lost a helicopter. He came home, finished a theatre degree at the University of Nevada, Reno, and spent the next decade learning two crafts at once — directing actors at the National Comedy Theatre in San Diego, and building production AI, ML, and data-science systems for enterprise. The two crafts turn out to be the same craft: get a complicated cast of agents to perform reliably under live conditions, and make sure the audit trail holds up the morning after.

He is the founder of San Diego AI, a senior-practitioner consulting practice based in San Diego County. Twelve-plus years of enterprise AI work; public-sector experience across federal, state, local, and academic engagements; production AI delivered for Fortune-500 media and entertainment partners; recently extended into legal-agentic AI in regulated environments. The practice is capped at six engagements per year — structurally, not as marketing — and the deliverables are working systems and memos. No slide decks. He lives and works in San Diego County.