Joe Wilson
Builds with AI. Joe Wilson Builds · AI Builders Club
Summary
Thirty years in tech, twenty-seven at Microsoft: Microsoft → AWS → Rapsodo → Obey. The operator who turns ambiguous customer problems into systems that ship. At Rapsodo I ran customer success as a one-person function — CS, ops, data engineering, support — by pairing enterprise judgment with Claude Code as the engineering partner. Now I build with AI in public on Joe Wilson Builds and teach mid-career people to build something nobody can take from them through AI Builders Club.
Experience
Independent AI Architect
I build and run persistent agents. Since 2024 I have operated my own always-on personal agent: it carries memory across sessions and machines, works by chat, voice and phone, schedules its own proactive actions, and waits for a human yes before anything outward-facing leaves the system.
- Always-on personal agent, built and run since 2024: Claude Code agents, a custom MCP memory server with vector search (RAG), a session briefing that rebuilds context at every start, and a daemon that runs scheduled work around the clock across two machines.
- Published Future Pruning (working paper, Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23637938): an agent plants decision points in its own future and, when each comes due, reopens the current record and does it, changes it, or lets it go. First evidence: a 28-moment field sample (acted on 9, changed 6, let 13 go) and a 346-chain simulation across 16 language models.
- One agent, many channels: chat, Telegram, a browser call page, ElevenLabs voice notes and a live phone line all route into the same memory-carrying session, with least-privilege tools, human approval for every outward-facing action, audit trails and kill switches.
- Shipped Open Feedback Factory (agent-based feedback-to-feature platform with a published npm SDK) and production AI apps for clients, including an AI compliance tool for Missouri lobbying disclosures and a teacher-inquiry platform.
- Created AI Builders Club (aibuildersclub.ai): 25 weekly live Build Nights and a 14-day build sprint course teaching non-technical professionals to build AI workflows.
- Named inventor on U.S. provisional patent application No. 63/793,621 for a privacy-first AI personalization engine.
Director of Customer Success
Ran customer success across two product lines and moved an engineering role into CS to build an agent-based architecture with Product.
- Developed and deployed agents for ticket triage, Gong-style coaching for sales, support and CX teams, and customer success workflows.
- Deployed a root-cause agent that reviewed every support issue and routed true bugs, UI problems and documentation gaps to the right team; in a 6-component pilot it cut Product fix times from months to weeks and surfaced an 86% mislabel rate in "alignment" tickets.
- Led AI adoption across Rapsodo North America: trained 50 of roughly 180 employees across sales, support, customer success, marketing and product over 25 hands-on sessions.
- Built a gradient-boosting churn-risk model across 2,000+ accounts; the tiered plan it produced became a CEO-backed Q1 priority.
Customer Success Manager and AI Architect
Led Microsoft 365 Copilot and GenAI adoption for 8 enterprise financial-services customers, and helped them design and build agent-based systems.
- Designed and delivered Copilot adoption programs: use cases, communications, champion programs, training and Copilot Analytics reviews. Copilot adoption rose 35% across key accounts.
- Helped customers define, architect and build agent-based systems with Copilot Studio: connectors and actions, authentication, Microsoft Graph connectors, Power Platform environments, Teams publishing and Power Automate flows.
- Built a Proactive Customer Satisfaction Copilot (Power Automate, Azure OpenAI, Teams); in one quarter across 5 customers, CSAT rose 22%, "very satisfied" rose from 51% to 89%, and escalation response time fell 40%.
- Led MCEM Copilot, a RAG assistant that coached sellers through Microsoft's sales methodology; Microsoft Global Hackathon 2023 Executive Challenge Honorable Mention, top 1% among 16,000 projects.
- Prepared customer tenants for Copilot (Entra ID access reviews, oversharing cleanup, Purview sensitivity labels and DLP). Customer Hero Award, January 2025.
Principal, Data Platforms
Cloud strategy advisor for global enterprise clients — translating Microsoft-centric environments into AWS-native solutions with scalable impact. Partnered across engineering, sales, and customer success to deliver cloud roadmaps, technical strategy, and platform transition plans for mission-critical workloads.
- Led customer-facing architecture strategy sessions, providing executive-ready roadmaps for cloud adoption, data modernization, and infrastructure optimization.
- Bridged Microsoft ecosystem fluency with AWS expertise to guide clients through high-risk migrations — ensuring performance, continuity, and long-term alignment with AWS capabilities.
- Mentored internal AWS field teams and partner stakeholders on enterprise transformation best practices, co-creating repeatable GTM patterns across industries.
- Identified friction in customer journeys and proactively restructured solution frameworks, improving retention and increasing expansion potential across cloud engagements.
22 years of progressive seniority across enterprise sales, technical advisory, and field leadership
22 years inside Microsoft, across the arc of enterprise tech — from on-prem to cloud, from product launches to executive advisory. The operating reps behind everything since.
- Senior Technology Strategist | Enterprise Cloud & SaaS Transformation (2013–2020). Virtual CIO and Solution Architect for Microsoft's most complex, regulated, high-value accounts. Cloud transformation across finance, healthcare, manufacturing. Forged high-trust relationships with CEOs, CTOs, CDOs, CIOs. Quota overperformance + revenue expansion across core accounts.
- Enterprise Enablement & Competitive Strategy Lead (2010–2013). Designed Microsoft's national "Compete Clinic" program three consecutive years. 35% win-rate improvement on competitive escalations. 100% CSAT on executive briefings. Launched a field intelligence network that cut time-to-insight by 50%.
- Enterprise Cloud Transformation Lead | Early SaaS Strategy (2006–2010). Led the launch of one of Microsoft's first commercial cloud customers — pioneering the path to Office 365. Recognized as one of the Top 3 Area Technology Specialists in the U.S.; awarded Central Region Technology Specialist of the Year.
- Senior Technical Product Manager | Windows Server Launch & Enablement (2002–2004). Created the official Windows Server launch demo presented by Microsoft's CFO to thousands of investors. Reduced support escalations 60% through positioning alignment with real-world value.
- Pre-Sales Solution Strategist | Collaboration & Mobility GTM (1999–2002). Led Microsoft's largest U.S. product launches for Office and Windows — 10,000+ attendees per event, 93% lead conversion. 240% YoY revenue growth. Quota over-attainment of 115% and 177%.
- Enterprise Customer Success Manager | Premier Support (1998–1999). Frontline customer advocate. Transformed four key accounts from "somewhat satisfied" to "very satisfied" within 90 days. 300% revenue YoY on dedicated support agreements.
- Honors: Technology Specialist of the Year, Top Contributor (East and Central Regions), Peer Leadership Award, Goldstar Award.
Builds
Rapsodo CS Infrastructure
The work that proves the thesis. Built the entire post-sale customer experience system across two product lines as a solo function. Real-time behavioral pipeline (Mixpanel → Iterable via Cloud Run, bypassing MuleSoft's 24-hour batch delay). Predictive churn + success models. AI-first Tier 1 / Tier 2 support tooling. Unified Zendesk + Jira + product usage feed into one customer pipeline.
Who's Hiring, 15 Years
Every Hacker News hiring thread since 2011, on one page. Bet №1. Every thread since April 2011, pulled from the public HN API and sifted into one static page: posts per month, remote by year, stated pay, roles over time, the 600 companies that hire every year, and every post this month read by Claude for one reader — mid-career, laid off, deciding at 2 AM what's worth an hour. Built in one sitting; $0.85 of model calls, logged to the cent. Every number links to its source. The Bet build covered 184 threads and 93,193 posts through October 2026; the live page refreshes monthly and, as of November 5, shows 185 threads and 93,375 posts.
Popcorn
Researched facts that pop up over YouTube while you watch. Pop-Up Video for anything on YouTube, except the bubbles are researched. Click the popcorn on a video and it reads the transcript, researches the video on the web, and pins each fact to the second its subject comes up: the backstory, who the people are, what happened after, and where the video is wrong. Every card links its source. It runs on the AI you already pay for (Claude Code, Codex or an OpenRouter key), with no Popcorn account or server. What broke: before release, an outside AI review found that a malicious web page could have reached the local server and spent your plan. The server now refuses anything that isn't you. Setup is one message pasted to your coding agent.
SwordFinder
Finds the ugliest strikeout swings in baseball, every day. A live MLB product that ranks swords, the two-strike swings where a fooled hitter's bat dies out front. It reads every pitch from Statcast, scores each strikeout swing, and gives each one a share page, a place on the leaderboards and a clip wherever MLB still serves one. What broke: the first version ran across five services, and when the API disappeared and the database paused, the site went dark while a failing health check went unread. I rebuilt it with no database and no server. A daily job writes plain data files, so a quiet off-season can't take it down.
We Read Them
True-crime reels built from the record, not the retelling. Published as a Claude Code skill. We read the FBI file, the depositions and the bodycam so you don't have to, and show what they say against what everyone thinks they know. First case: Gabby Petito, a 3:44 film and eleven vertical reels made in one day. The whole process is published as a skill anyone can install: three research agents, a facts gate where every quote is checked against the page image, FBI Vault files through the Wayback Machine, news clips cut on Whisper word timings, one-take ElevenLabs narration with a second voice that reads the record, and picture rendered in code. It's updated in the open as it improves.
Open Feedback Factory
Feedback from inside your app becomes guarded pull requests, and each user is told what happened. Users ask for things in a small widget inside the app. Each ask is scrubbed of emails, keys and tokens, grouped with similar requests, and either queued, held until enough people ask, sent back with a question, or blocked; requests that touch auth, billing or privacy go to a person. A worker hands the sanitized summary to a coding agent on its own branch, a pull request and CI follow, and nothing merges until a recorded reviewer approval and every policy gate pass. The user who asked sees the outcome in the same widget. The public repository is an early alpha; newer work isn't released yet.
CanvaKilla
The banner maker that knows where every platform actually crops. AI banners and profile pictures for X and LinkedIn. Every prompt carries the platform's crop rules, so the face, logo and tagline stay out of the avatar circle, the mobile buttons and the strips the platform trims off. A live desktop and mobile preview shows where they land, and the proof export draws the crop guides on the image. Built because Canva kept hiding banner text behind avatars, mobile follow buttons and the strips X clips off the top and bottom.
I need a damn headshot fast!
One ordinary photo in, a studio headshot out, and it still looks like you. By Headshot Innovations. Upload one ordinary photo and get back a studio headshot that still looks like the person in it. Invite-only beta; anyone can request an invite on the landing page.
LunaOS
An always-on personal AI operating system. Dual local/cloud architecture built on Claude Code CLI with a markdown/bash skill layer. SQLite + Supabase sync, persistent memory across sessions, autonomous scheduled tasks. Inspired by OpenClaw's REM backfill memory system.
LeagueCast
AI-generated fantasy football podcast platform. Sleeper API integration for league data. Dual AI hosts via ElevenLabs voice cloning. Personalized weekly audio briefings. Co-built with Hayden (Associate PM).
AI Builders Club
Where mid-career people learn to build something nobody can take from them. The business behind the channel. Waitlist mode: doors open after episode six, and the list hears first.
Stack
- AI / LLM (primary)
- Claude · Claude Code · Anthropic API · MCP · Cursor · ElevenLabs · fal.ai · OpenAI API
- Customer Success & Lifecycle
- Mixpanel · Iterable · Salesforce · Zendesk · Jira · Intercom
- Data & Infrastructure
- Google Cloud Run · BigQuery · Supabase · Vercel · Elasticsearch · MongoDB · SQLite
- Dev
- TypeScript · Python · Node.js · Next.js · SQL · Git
- Operating style
- Systems thinking · End-to-end ownership · Executive communication · Cross-functional leadership · Bias for shipping