Open to AI operations, implementation & enablement roles · Remote (U.S.)
I'm Michael Charles, an AI operations and implementation operator with eleven years in IT operations — infrastructure, Microsoft 365 and identity, endpoint and service operations across public sector and private industry.
Today I serve as CIO for a national freight brokerage, contracted through Zero Disruption IT. I build agent-assisted workflows with source controls, quality gates and human review, and I document what is proven, what is still being measured, and where a system has to stop.
I work across domains rather than down into one. What I do well is take a general-purpose technology, learn it properly, and turn it into something a team can use on an ordinary Tuesday.
That has now happened three times in my lifetime. First the computer moved onto the desk, with a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse, and everyone around me had to be shown what to do with it. Then the browser arrived, and inside a few years Google stopped being a company and turned into something people did. Both times the technology showed up well before the working knowledge did, and somebody had to close that distance.
AI is the third time, and it is the first one I have been in the room for professionally. The vocabulary is new — context windows, prompt and context engineering, tool use, agents and MCP servers, evals, quality gates, human-in-the-loop review — and most of it is still being argued over. Learning it is the easy part. The work is deciding which of it belongs in your business, and being straight about which parts do not.
That job has been the same in every vertical I have worked in.
Every case says what I owned, where AI agents assisted under review, and what belonged to others. If an impact number isn't documented yet, it isn't claimed.
Built a local, governed memory and quality-gate layer that lets multiple AI tools share source-backed context, proposals and verification artifacts. AI coding agents assisted with implementation under review.
I own the operating requirements, deployment decisions, and source tie-out for data-pipeline and leadership-dashboard software with source controls, validation gates, monitoring, and scoped recovery. AI agents assisted with implementation, testing, deployment, and adversarial review. Client leaders retain operational and finance definitions and acceptance authority; the source-system vendor owns the source feed and vendor-side behavior.
Developed packaged AP/COGS and AR reconciliation workflows with launchers, a bundled runtime, review outputs and fail-closed validation.
Led planning and coordination for an MSP-to-internal IT ownership transition, aligning vendor, access, inventory, security and operating workstreams, and designed the transition intake covering infrastructure, admin access, security tools, backups, subscriptions, open work and operational handoff. Analyzed Microsoft licensing, backup, email-security and managed-service cost components to clarify pricing drivers and decision tradeoffs.
Built and governed agent-assisted workflows; adoption and impact metrics are being documented.
Each one came out of something going wrong.
A number without a source check is a guess. My workflows carry the check — and the source — with them, with a human review step before anything counts.
When a source doesn't match, or a check can't run, the system stops and reports it. Otherwise a wrong number sits in a report for a month before anyone notices.
Some workflows aren't ready. Some will cost more than they return. I would rather say that in week one than defend a weak project in month six.
Client: RDS Capacity Solutions · national freight brokerage
Zero Disruption IT, LLC
Pleasant Hill School District #1
Tulare County Superior Court
Enterprise network operations and city government IT
Anthropic Claude Partner Network member (Zero Disruption IT), with Anthropic Academy certificates in Claude 101, Claude Code in Action, and Introduction to Agent Skills (2026).
Lane Community College, Eugene, OR. Associate's Degree, Network and System Administration, 2007–2009.
Available now · Remote (U.S.)
I led this work inside one company while also running its IT, with AI agents assisting implementation under review. I want it as my full role, with teammates, code review, and problems I haven't seen yet.