Meet James
James J. Baker spent more than fifteen years leading enterprise delivery and automation programs in heavily regulated environments, including banking, agriculture finance, and global commodities trading, before turning his full attention to the question that now drives his work. What does delivery look like when artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the cost of building software?
He is the author of AI Scrum: The Agile Inversion, a 750-page framework for integrating AI into enterprise Agile delivery without sacrificing the governance, compliance, and human judgment that regulated industries require. The book is the product of two decades of delivery experience meeting two years of intensive hands-on AI work.
A Builder First, A Writer Second
James began his career as a builder. As an Operations Analyst at a motorcycle manufacturer in the mid-2000s, he designed and built a vendor rating system that reduced warranty costs by 40 percent and saved the company over five million dollars in its first two years. The system used SQL, geocoding, and what would now be called early data analytics to identify root causes of product failures by model and geography. The work was later written up as an academic case study and published by the Clute Institute, but the system itself, running in production and saving real dollars, was always the point.
That pattern repeated across his career. At Hartman Companies, he built SharePoint workflow automation including multi-stage workflows up to 110 nodes, alongside VBA-driven Excel tooling that put automation into the hands of non-technical users. At Koch Supply and Trading, he implemented Automation Anywhere RPA across an eighteen-month engagement that reduced operational overhead by 10 percent. At American AgCredit, he led data platform delivery as Scrum Master and Delivery Lead, improving cycle time by 15 percent and team velocity by 20 percent while maintaining zero compliance violations across a six-year program portfolio.
Fifteen-plus years. Four employers. Four generations of automation tooling. One continuous thread.
From Development to Validation
In late 2023, as AI began to reshape software delivery, James recognized that the conversation most people were having about AI, namely how much faster developers can write code, was the wrong conversation. The interesting question was downstream. If AI compresses code generation from days to minutes, then the traditional Agile bottleneck of development capacity disappears. What replaces it is the bottleneck of validation, governance, and architectural soundness.
In early 2024 he earned the Certified Prompt Engineer credential to work directly with the mechanics of large language models. In 2025 he added the IBM AI Product Manager certification and the Scrum Alliance AI for Scrum Masters credential. He left full-time employment in May 2025 and entered a deliberate period of building, writing, and applied study. He architected a self-hosted multi-modal AI pipeline as a working laboratory, published the AI Scrum framework, and created the interactive Periodic Table of AI as a public teaching tool.
The work product of that period is what you find on this site.
Staying Ahead of the Technology
James is a former private pilot, and he applies an aviation principle to AI. Stay ahead of the airplane. A pilot who is reacting to the aircraft instead of flying it is already in trouble. The same is true of a leader managing AI in production. The job is to govern the technology, not to be governed by it. The frameworks, certifications, and hands-on builds documented across this site are all aimed at that single discipline.
Credentials
IBM Certified AI Product Manager (AIPM)
AI for Scrum Masters, Scrum Alliance
Certified Prompt Engineer (CPE)
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
B.S. Business Administration, Kansas State University
