Five experienced builders. The full partnership in every engagement.
There is no junior bench between the partner and the client. There are vetted technical and subject matter experts who get pulled in for execution depth, deployed where the project demands it.
The Partners.
John M. Spivey
Strategic vision, client relationships, project direction.
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James McMahon
AI strategy, training program design, client leadership.
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Daniel Spivey
Quality assurance lead, curriculum architect, training delivery.
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Bedon Lancaster
Software engineering lead, agent architect, workflow designer.
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James Perkins
Platform architecture, AWS Solutions Architect, data infrastructure.
Read bio →How We're Structured.
The studio exists because a group of experienced practitioners decided to take a small number of companies somewhere most companies can’t get to themselves.
The work has been thirty years in the making. Several of us spent careers solving operational problems with technology in industries where the answer was rarely on the shelf. We built companies. We ran them. We sold them. We watched a few succeed, and we watched a few teach us harder lessons. The skill that carried across every chapter, looking at a business honestly and finding the place where the right technology, applied to the right problem, would actually move it forward, is the skill we bring to the work now.
When the underlying capabilities of AI shifted in 2022 and 2023 we dove in deep. We then recognized that our operating-company skills, coupled with our expanding knowledge and comfort with AI, was a powerful combination. We started getting calls from company leaders who needed someone they could trust to help them plan for AI transformation.
Plainbox Studio is the firm we built to answer those calls. Selectively.
What drives us.
Every business comes to us with different priorities. Some need to move fast. Others need to reduce cost-per-unit-of-output. Others want to future-proof the organization or create a new revenue stream we end up co-owning.
We don't impose a single metric of success. We start by understanding what matters most to your business and orient every decision around that.
What we will do is push back when an idea is technically feasible but strategically weak. We will sometimes tell a client not to build something. We will always favor the initiative that moves the needle over the one that looks impressive in a board presentation.
We work iteratively. Working software ships early. The data tells us what to adjust as we go. Timelines and scope stay honest as a result.