Earlier this year, I told one of the most successful trial lawyers in America that software alone wasn't going to cut it.
Mark Lanier's firm had started using BoodleBox, the collaborative AI workspace where I work. I'd run a few sessions teaching him and his team how to use it. And somewhere in those sessions it became obvious to me that a login and a training deck would never survive contact with a real trial.
So I said it plainly: if we're going to do this, I need to be in the room with you while you do it.
Then I was. Embedded with the trial team, before trial and during it. Not as tech support. As part of the team.
That trial became the first social media addiction case of its kind to reach a jury verdict, a landmark decision finding Meta and YouTube liable for the addictive design of their platforms. The lawyers won that case. Decades of judgment, storytelling, and preparation won that case. What we brought was a working model for how AI actually helps in a high-stakes profession: experts in their field, an AI usage expert in the room with them, and the workspace underneath as the collaborative harness holding it all together.
The workspace mattered. But the workspace alone would have been a login nobody used. The humans made it happen.
People ask how a company our size ended up inside one of the most consequential tech cases in history, when the firm could have used any AI tool on the market.
Here's how Mark Lanier found us: through a university. Lipscomb, one of the schools in our network. No ad campaign, no enterprise sales funnel. A relationship led to a conversation, and a conversation led to a courtroom.
That's not an accident. It's how everything at our company grows, because we've built around a simple observation about the AI industry:
Try getting a human being from a trillion-dollar AI company on the phone.
There's a support ticket, a chatbot, a help center article. At their scale, human attention is a rounding error they've optimized away. That's a rational choice when you're building one product for eight billion people. It's also a gap, and the gap is enormous.
BoodleBox serves more than 120,000 educators, students, and professionals across 1,300+ schools and organizations. When people hear those numbers, they assume the growth came from better technology.
I'll be honest about something most AI companies won't say out loud: the underlying models are converging. Everyone is building on similar foundations, and the technology gap between AI companies shrinks every quarter. Nobody chooses us because model number 38 is smarter than someone else's model number 38.
They choose us for what happens around the models. When a professor emails us confused about designing an AI-native assignment, a person writes back. When something breaks the night before a board meeting, a person responds. When a faculty member is skeptical, or frightened, or quietly wondering whether this technology makes thirty years of expertise obsolete, we get on a plane and sit in the room.
And increasingly, we build alongside the people we serve. I developed an introduction-to-AI course that a faculty member at Georgia State University is now teaching in the classroom. We didn't sell them a curriculum. We made one together.
The hard part of AI adoption was never the AI. It's the human questions: pedagogy, equity, fear, trust. You can't answer those with a help center article. You answer them by showing up and taking the questions seriously, including the uncomfortable ones.
A sharp reader will spot the tension here. If human attention is what the giants sacrificed to scale, what happens when we scale? Doesn't success destroy the differentiator?
It would, if the human layer were a stage of growth. It isn't. It's the business model, and we plan to scale it deliberately: hire for it, staff for it, protect it as a line item when the spreadsheet says to cut it. The Lanier engagement wasn't a heroic one-off that depended on my calendar. It's a repeatable structure, and we're repeating it now across the industries we serve. Field experts, an embedded AI expert, the workspace as harness. That's the product.
I'd go further. This is a gap in the AI industry as a whole, and it's sitting there for any company willing to take it. The giants will keep winning the general-purpose race; they should. But education, law, and healthcare are trust businesses, and trust is still built the old way. One answered email. One phone call. One person who shows up.
Trust doesn't have an API.
If you're building an AI company, or buying from one, the question worth asking has changed. "Whose model is best?" has a different answer every three months. The durable question is simpler: when something goes wrong, who picks up the phone?
Every AI company is racing to remove humans from the loop. What I saw in that courtroom, and what I see on campuses every week, points the other way. The loop is the humans. The AI just makes the loop faster.
You don't need a company shipping you a generalized product from a thousand miles away. You need one willing to live in there with you.
Zach Kinzler is Head of AI Solutions at BoodleBox, where he leads the team turning AI capability into real-world outcomes for BoodleBox's customers across education, legal, and enterprise. His work centers on a simple thesis: the companies that win in specialized industries won't be the ones with the best model — they'll be the ones who show up as humans.
Zach hosts the Smarter Campus Podcast, where he talks with higher ed leaders about AI literacy, access, and what responsible adoption actually looks like on campus. He's been featured in national media, including a Forbes profile on his mission to make AI safer and more human-centered, and The Washington Times quoted his warning that schools adopting AI graduation requirements without the right infrastructure risk widening the very equity gap they're trying to close. He's also a highly regarded voice on topics such as AI literacy and equity in education.
Zach is also a visible face for BoodleBox's highest-profile partnerships. He's co-presented alongside CEO France Hoang at events like the Lanier Trial Academy, bringing that same human-first philosophy to a room of legal professionals navigating what AI means for their profession.
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