What Happened When the Company Shut Down

In April 2026, Thoughtful AI and all the business units that had merged into Smarter Technologies were shut down. The private equity firm that had orchestrated the merger made the decision after concluding that the combined entity wasn't on a path to the returns they needed. Seven months after the merger closed and the combined company had started to find its footing, the plug was pulled.

The cuts were deep. About 85% of employees lost their jobs. The people who survived were almost entirely in Product and Engineering, the functions with portable technical assets that the PE firm's portfolio companies could absorb. Everyone else was let go.

I was the exception.

Why I Was Retained

Executives at two different organizations intervened specifically to keep me: the private equity firm itself, and AccessHealthcare, the largest company in the Smarter Technologies portfolio. AccessHealthcare is a multi-billion dollar healthcare BPO, one of the largest healthcare revenue cycle management companies in the world. They had been watching my work through the SE process, and they didn't want to lose the capability I represented.

The retention decision had nothing to do with technical assets or code I'd written. It was about a skill that's harder to hire for: the ability to explain complex AI systems to people who aren't technical, in ways that connect to the problems they're actually trying to solve, in ways that move them from skeptical to convinced. That's what I'd been doing in pre-sales at Thoughtful. That's what I'd been doing with the PE firm during the Smarter Technologies period. That's what they needed.

Being the only non-Product/Engineering person retained in an 85% reduction isn't a metric I expected to have on my resume. But it's one of the clearest signals I have about what I actually do well.

VP of Solutions at AccessHealthcare

Within the first month after the shutdown, I was promoted to a VP-level Solutions role at AccessHealthcare. The promotion wasn't a formality. It was an acknowledgment that what I was being asked to do, driving AI adoption strategy across the largest BPO in healthcare RCM, required the authority and access that a director-level title doesn't provide when walking into a room of C-suite executives.

AccessHealthcare processes claims and manages revenue cycle operations for hundreds of health systems and payer organizations. Their clients are not small. They are major regional health systems, national payers, and large physician groups. Convincing those organizations to adopt AI-powered workflows, and convincing AccessHealthcare's own leadership to change how they operate, requires a different kind of technical communication than what I was doing in pre-sales at a startup.

The fundamentals are the same: understand the real problem before talking about solutions, connect the technology to specific workflows rather than pitching capabilities in the abstract, give people a mental model they can use rather than a product demo they'll forget. But the stakes are higher, the audiences are more skeptical, and the organizational dynamics are more complex.

What This Period Represents

The jump from Director of SE at a startup to VP of Solutions at a multi-billion dollar enterprise happened because of a single demonstrated skill: I can take genuinely complex AI technology and make it legible to the people who need to adopt it. Not in a dumbed-down way. In a way that respects their intelligence, connects to their specific context, and gives them confidence to move forward.

That's what the value realization model at Thoughtful did. That's what the Cowork skills did when I built a tool so useful that people were asking my agent questions on their behalf. That's what the pre-sales work did when 96% of prospects I met with moved to proposal. And that's what carried me through an 85% reduction while everyone around me was let go.

I don't think of this as a personal brand statement. I think of it as the thing I'm most useful for: bridging the gap between what AI can actually do and the people who need to decide whether to trust it.