Igniting Human Potential in the Age of AI
Coaching, training, and consulting to help small business owners and mid-to-late-career professionals thrive alongside AI — not get left behind by it.
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Coaching, training, and consulting to help small business owners and mid-to-late-career professionals thrive alongside AI — not get left behind by it.
Start the ConversationPractical AI training with clear pathways to the skills you need to know now.
Individual and small-group coaching in AI skills, in-person (Flagstaff area) or online. The fastest path to real competency and understanding.
Workshops, courses, and group programs designed for people who want to build skills and confidence in their ability to use AI.
Guiding small business owners to the tools, techniques, and trainings that make sense for them and their employees, without all the hype and jargon.
Navigating Our AI Future, a Substack on finding your way in turbulent times, using your lived experience and curiosity to decide which path fits you.
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Ariel's path to AI wasn't a straight line. Twenty-five years ago, she was a wildland firefighter and EMT, learning to stay calm under pressure and lead from principle. She carried those lessons into her next career as a software developer, eventually becoming a software engineering manager leading a Business Intelligence and data science team preparing healthcare for the AI transition.
She jokes she went from the frying pan into the fire when she left corporate healthcare mid-pandemic to study drones in environmental science at Duke. A task that once took hours—counting albatross nests by hand from drone footage—took minutes with AI. That was when everything clicked: a path back into wildfire work, this time through drones, geospatial data, and AI. She earned her drone pilot's credential, became an NFPA Certified Wildfire Mitigation Specialist, and built AI models to predict wildfire risk.
But the more she used AI, the more she saw looming on the horizon, like a smoke column in the distance, how unprepared we all were for what was coming.
Today, Ariel coaches individuals and small businesses through AI adoption, serves as Communications Officer for the Earthsight AI Consortium, runs the Northern Arizona AI Meetup, and teaches AI to adult learners at Coconino Community College. Her approach: curiosity over fear, lived experience as your AI advantage, and above all, learning by doing.
Community and industry ties behind the work.
A community of AI enthusiasts of every age and skill level, who meet monthly to learn, share, and build cool stuff together.
Visit noazai.org
Ariel Strong, Director of AI Applications Development, Education, and Training. EAIC featured in the August 2026 Flagstaff Business News.
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