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James McDonough is a CEO, passionate entrepreneur, industrial innovator, and digital…
Articles by James
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After The Agents Take Your Job - AI Dominos
After The Agents Take Your Job - AI Dominos
I’ve been deeply immersed in AI for years. I can’t sit in team meetings, with vendors, at conferences, at my children’s…
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6 Reasons Why AutoDesk’s PlanGrid Acquisition Makes A Ton Of Sense
6 Reasons Why AutoDesk’s PlanGrid Acquisition Makes A Ton Of Sense
Autodesk has just acquired PlanGrid for $875M, one of the early Industrial Connected Worker vendors. There has been a…
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James McDonough posted thisIn the last month I’ve met +100 CEOs from all over the world. From startups, mid market to billion-dollar operators. Unsurprisingly 90% of conversations are focused around with AI. When I double-click, the emotional spectrum is fascinating: • Euphoric builders - Large company CEO's with tech teams, staying up late, solo experimenting, sharing use cases, seeing early margin expansion. • Disillusioned leaders - delegated to the team, failed and now trying to regroup for another run at it. • Quietly terrified operators - deer in the headlights, but actively trying to learn more. • Parents - Concerned about what to teach their kids? Or actively trying to help their new grad get in the door to something. • Freedom seekers - exploring how AI can reduce work and increase time with family. One unexpected theme keeps emerging: The fastest adopters are wrestling with how quickly to reduce headcount and what that means for society. These are disciplined, bottom-line capitalists. Yet many are pausing to ask wider questions: “Just because I can… should I?” We are entering a phase where technical capability is outpacing moral clarity.
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James McDonough posted thishttps://lnkd.in/gtNYVFZJ Silicon Valley is typically the tip of the spear of knowledge work operational strategy. We'll see more and more of these headcount reductions as companies realize that the majority of current work can be done by teams of agents managed by a few humans. Buckle up.
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James McDonough shared thisMy thoughts on AI, the Agentic Enterprise, and our future.
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James McDonough posted thisSydney last week for #YPO #EDGE (a global CEO conference). My biggest productivity unlock wasn’t a session — it was talking with my personal AI agent. In and out of sessions and for almost an entire day before flying home to the USA. Speaking ideas out loud + getting pushback = better plans, faster, and a higher volume of execution. PLUS more time outside, less time staring at a laptop in a hotel room. This is the future of work.
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James McDonough posted thisNow CEOs ask "What should we do / Where should we go?" Emerging CEOs ask "What constraints shape who we can become?
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James McDonough posted thisOne thing is becoming very clear: AI is shifting the entire way organizations are being built and run. From people & processes → fluid intelligent system. For decades, companies were built around human effort supported by software. We’re now in a phase where the intelligence layer itself becomes the core operating system. AIOS or whatever term that will eventually emerge. Subtle now, but it changes everything. Instead of designing organizations around headcount, hierarchy, and static tools, companies are increasingly being built around adaptive systems that learn and evolve on their own. The advantage is already going to leaders who understand this shift early — those who design their companies like living systems rather than linear machines. We are witnessing the beginning of a completely new architecture for building businesses. Buckle up.
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James McDonough shared this🌾 Help Us Feed 600 Families This Thanksgiving 🍂 What started as a simple vision — to bring warmth, dignity, and a full Thanksgiving meal to families in need — has grown into something truly special. This year, our Basket Brigade program aims to feed more than 600 underserved families in Houston. And here’s how you can help: For just $50, you can provide a complete Thanksgiving meal — turkey, sides, desserts, and all the trimmings — for one family. Whenever I see donation posts, I always wonder: “Where does the money actually go?” In this case, I can tell you with 100% certainty — every single dollar of your $50 goes directly toward buying the food. All of the overhead — the trucks, delivery, assembly, and logistics — is covered by our team personally. Not a dime of your donation goes anywhere except to feed a family. So, when you’re gathered around your own Thanksgiving table this year, you’ll know you helped another family experience that same joy and gratitude. If you, your family or team would like to take it one step further, you can also join us in assembling and delivering the baskets — details are in the link below. My family will be there, too. ❤️ I challenge you: 👉 Donate $50. 👉 Share this post. 👉 Tag a few friends, coworkers, or groups to join in. https://lnkd.in/gYe9P7KA #Thanksgiving #Community #BasketBrigade #GiveBack #Gratitude #MakeADifference #houston #htown
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James McDonough posted thisSuperintelligence isn’t a moment — it’s a compounding, accelerating cascade. We’re still at the beginning, but the shift is undeniable: AI is now assisting with the majority of my thinking, planning, emails, and decision-making. Simple processes are being automated. We are stitching together — process to process — into full workflows and finalized outputs emerging. Suddenly, a department is automated. Then the lines blur — multiple departments converge into seamless, intelligent systems. Soon, entire companies will operate on code and logic instead of roles and hierarchy. Suppliers and vendors merge, collapse, or evolve as value chains get rewritten across industries. Industries themselves begin to dissolve into fully automated, self-operating ecosystems. And beyond that… we start to ask: What is capitalism when labor, production, and coordination are mostly automated? We’re not there yet. But the cascade has shifted into a new gear. It starts with a little GPT helping you write an email — and ends with a complete redefinition of how value is created and moves through society.
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1mo
PLAYBOOK
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2mo
Derrick Turk, thanks for your comment. Yes, overall I'm optimistic about the future with a strong belief in humans ability to adapt and overcome long term. Short term = bumpy for many. Buckle up!
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James McDonough liked thisJames McDonough liked thisA few weeks ago I got to give a talk at Anthropic's offices in SF. It was surreal, and somehow completely familiar. I think Anthropic is the most important company in the world right now. Claude is the most consequential technology since the internet. So walking into their HQ and connecting people and a space to something I interact with every single day was special. But here's the familiar part: their building is literally next door to my old office on Howard Street (I can see my old window in the ugly building in my outdoor shot). I walked past their building every single day for five years. Had tea in the coffee shop downstairs. Some things move in smaller circles than you'd think. A few things stuck with me: 1. SF is back. It used to be my home, and I spent time there during the pandemic. That was bleak. The crypto years were somehow worse. But the energy right now is genuinely off the charts. If you're in tech and can get there, get there. Now. 2. Companies are run by people. This sounds obvious until you're in a room where it becomes real again. Twenty years ago I visited Silicon Valley for the first time and was struck by how human it all was - a community of people who work and live and play together as people. Anthropic reminded me of that. 3. The world moves in small circles. Cherish them. The building next door. The faces you recognize. The conversations that keep finding you. There's a lot about AI that has people nervous - and reasonably so. But it isn't as alien and impersonal as it seems.
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James McDonough liked thisAmong THE largest markets in the world.. the CAPITAL Markets. This transition is finally upon us. It kinda started with the Bitcoin Blockchain, and Ethereum and others took it further. A decade ago - I laid out WHY the emerging technology then, would lay the foundation for "the Internet of Assets" - fully transparent, 24 x 7, extremely low friction, and indelible. It's STARTING. Here BTW is a 'retro clip' - also in the comments. https://lnkd.in/dmb2wQ3JJames McDonough liked this🚀 ICME x NYSE Wired — “NEWFI” Summit 🚀 This Wednesday we’re bringing "NewFi" to life—uniting the leaders building the New Financial Ecosystem, live from the world’s most iconic exchange and trading floor - NYSE 🎶 Music by Gaby Endo (Robot Heart) 🔥 Plus a surprise main act you don’t want to miss An incredible lineup of founders, CEOs, and category‑defining builders converging at the intersection of capital, crypto, and culture.: 🔹 Joseph Lubin, Founder & CEO, Consensys 🔹 Don Wilson, CEO, DRW 🔹 Thomas (Tom) Lee, Chairman, Bitminer Ltd 🔹 Bill Tai, ICME Co‑Founder & Chair, ACTAI Global 🔹 Helena Zhang, Co‑Founder, ICME 🔹 Peter Smith, Co‑Founder & Co‑CEO, Blockchain.com 🔹 Carlos Domingo, Founder & CEO, Securitize 🔹 Robert Leshner, CEO, Superstate 🔹 Xin Song, CEO, GSR 🔹 Gurpreet Oberoi , Head of Institutions, Kraken 🔹 Griffin Dunaif, Co‑Founder & CEO, Halliday 🔹 Danny Yang, CEO, Metagood 🔹 Mitch Chalt, CEO, GFT Rewards 🔹 Frank Chaparro, Head of Special Projects, GSR 🔹 Arash Attar, Co‑Founder, ICME Big ideas. Real capital. Institutional scale. ONLY AT THE NYSE 🔥 The future of finance is being built now - Follow our Crypto Trailblazers Series - https://lnkd.in/eHv7zdgQ John Furrier - Gemma Allen - SiliconANGLE & theCUBE - Paula Rosales - Amanda Terry #NEWFI #DigitalAssets #Crypto #CapitalMarkets #Web3 #Blockchain #NYSE #ICME #InstitutionalCrypto #FutureOfFinance #NYSEWired
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James McDonough liked thisJames McDonough liked thisThe Emergence Capital partners have spent the past 3 years in the trenches with over a dozen founders building AI-Native Services. Now, we're sharing what actually works. AI-Native Services (AINS) flip the model: you don’t sell software, you own the outcome. They use AI with a human wrapper to deliver services better, faster, and/or cheaper than incumbents. And the best ones are doing it at 50%+ gross margins vs the 20% typical of legacy service providers. But building an AINS company isn't easy. Strong revenue growth and solid retention can make it look like you have PMF when you're actually just running a human-powered services firm financed with the wrong kind of capital. We've invested in the early pioneers of this category, mapped the market, and worked closely with founders inside and outside our portfolio to document what actually works. The Spring 2026 AINS Playbook is the culmination of that work. It covers 9 aspects of building a great AI-native service: team, product-market fit, delivery, product roadmap, GTM, pricing, defensibility, metrics, and M&A. A lot of the lessons look nothing like how you'd build a SaaS company, and many are counterintuitive. Like why the best AINS companies are deliberately turning down customers. Or why you still need a killer demo even though the customer never touches your product. We're putting the final touches on it before GA. For early access, comment PLAYBOOK and I'll send it your way.
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James McDonough liked thisTokenization is THE mega wave for finance, and our world's capital markets.. This lineup is right in the thick of the transformation of the world's capital markets, and more.. 2026 marks >10 years for me working on tokenizing assets. Like in surfing, it takes years of prep and training to be ready to ride the wave. This doc (and open repository for "Project Barking Dog" ( https://lnkd.in/geSANWWv ) , started in 2015 with the economist that created the land title systems and enabled the economies of 13 countries, Hernando De Soto who later authored "Mystery of Capital". He now runs the Institute for Liberty and Democracy - ILD. Democracy and the supression of communism and socialism are only possible with indelible clarity, and transparancy of title and ownership of assets coupled with clear "Rule of Law". Some of my earlier thoughts were expressed in the age old Futurism video from 9 years ago as well: ( https://lnkd.in/dmb2wQ3J ) as well as the conferences we held for Fluidity (acquired by ConsenSys) almost a decade ago..( https://lnkd.in/dZ4vrVtt ) Lots of this prior thinking is reflected in the products and software infrastructure of both the host of this gathering at NYSE, .. ICME (Internet Capital Markets Exchange) as well as Metagood (Tokenizing Real World Assets) both of which I have helped co-found.James McDonough liked thisICME X NYSE - Digital Asset Summit 2026 Event at The New York Stock Exchange Announcing a killer lineup here at the NYSE on March 25th Our speakers are the builders, allocators, and operators actively shaping the future of finance.... Industry Titans 1. Joseph Lubin - Consensys 2. Peter Smith - Blockchain.com 3. Carlos Domingo - Securitize 4. Xin Song - GSR 5. Bill Tai - ACTAI Global 6. Michael Blaugrund, CFA - ICE 7. Mark Greenberg - xStocks - Kraken 8. Frank Chaparro - GSR 9. Helena Zhang - ICME 10. Arash Attar - ICME 11. Brian J. Baumann - NYSE Message me for details... https://www.icme.xyz/event Full Crypto Trailblazers Series - https://lnkd.in/eHv7zdgQ #NewFi #DigitalAssets #Tokenization #RWA #Leaders
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James McDonough liked thisJames McDonough liked thisHad meetings and a dinner with 20+ enterprise AI and IT leaders yesterday. Lots of interesting conversations around the state of AI in large enterprises, especially regulated businesses. Here are some of general trends: * Agents are clearly the big thing. Enterprises moving from talking about chatbots to agents, though we’re still very early. Coding is still the dominant agentic use-case being adopted thus far, with other categories of across knowledge work starting to emerge. Lots of agentic work moving from pilots and PoCs into production, and some enterprises had lots of active live use-cases. * Agentic use-cases span every part of a business, from back office operations to client facing experiences from sales to customer onboarding workflows. General feeling is that agentic workflows will hit every part of an organization, often with biggest focus on delivering better for customers, getting better insights and intelligence from data and documents, speeding up high ROI workflows with agents, and so on. Very limited discussion on pure cost cutting. * Data and AI governance still remain core challenges. Getting data and content into a spot that agents can securely and easily operate on remains a huge task for more organizations. Years of data management fragmentation that wasn’t a problem now is an issue for enterprises looking to adopt agents. And governing what agents can do with data in a workflow still a major topic. * Identity emerging as a big topic. Can the agent have access to everything you have? In a world of dozens of agents working on behalf, potentially too much data exposure and scope for the agents. How do we manage agents with partitioned level of access to your information? * Lots of emerging questions on how we will budget for tokens across use-cases and teams. Companies don’t want to constrain use-cases, but equally need to be mindful of ultimate token budgets. This is going to become a bigger part of OpEx over time, and probably won’t make sense to be considered an IT budget anymore. Likely needs to be factored into the rest of operating expenses. * Interoperability is key. Every enterprise is deploying multiple AI systems right now, and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a single platform to rule them all. Customers are getting savvier on how to handle agent interoperability, and this will be one of the biggest drivers of an AI stack going forward. Lots more takeaways than just this, but needless to say the momentum is building but equally enterprises are acutely aware of the change management and work ahead. Lots of opportunity right now.
Experience & Education
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FAT FINGER by SEE Forge
View James’s full experience
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Volunteer Experience
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Founder
Basket Brigade Houston
- Present 10 years 7 months
Social Services
Basket Brigade Houston is a charity event dedicated to feeding a Thanksgiving meals to families facing hardship. Fueled by volunteers and donors, we come together each year to spread dignity, gratitude, and hope—one basket, one family, one act of kindness at a time.
www.htxbasketbrigade.com -
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Hospice Volunteer
Silverado Hospice
- 1 year
Health
Publications
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Microsoft showcases SEE Forge for transforming Oil & Gas
Microsoft
See publication- Digital Oil Field
- Operational Excellence
- Improved production
- Reducing HSE risk -
SEE Forge Mobile Reporting Solution
West Australia Business News
Enhance any reporting process (safety, Maintenance, quality, etc) by taking it mobile (iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, etc).
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Honors & Awards
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Best Enterprise App - Productivity
Silicon Valley Bank - http://www.svbaawards.com/nominees.html
Nominated for 2013 Silicon Valley Business App Awards - Best Enterprise App - Productivity
http://www.svbaawards.com/see-forge.html -
2nd in Australia for Mobile Technology
http://ozapp.com.au/
http://ozapp.com.au/success-story-2013-ozapp-awards-runner-up-seeforge-expanding-to-the-u-s/
Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Japanese
Elementary proficiency
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