I’m Eureka Vanterpool. Before any of this was about AI, it was about operations.

I spent more than twenty years in media and marketing — Vice President of Multicultural Marketing and Senior Vice President of Operations at media and advertising agencies. Substantial budgets, national clients, teams that had to deliver on deadlines that didn’t move. What I actually did in those roles wasn’t marketing. It was figuring out why work was breaking down and rebuilding the process so it stopped breaking.

Then ChatGPT dropped. I started using it the week it launched, and it took about a day to know exactly what was coming. Most people in my world were either ignoring it or bracing for it. I went the other way.

I went deep — not on the hype, on the actual mechanics. I built with these tools daily, on real work, until I understood where they genuinely helped and where they quietly wasted your time. By the time I founded Big Horse Strategy in 2024, I wasn’t pivoting toward AI — the company was built around it from day one.

Because by then I’d noticed something.

Smart, capable people kept bouncing off AI. They’d try a tool, get a generic answer, and conclude it wasn’t for them. Every single time, the problem was the same: nobody had taught them the approach. The tools were fine. The instruction was missing.

That’s the gap I build for now. I developed the AWARE Framework for deciding what’s worth automating and what isn’t, and the Eureka Method for teaching people how to work with AI as a thinking partner instead of a vending machine. Both came out of real engagements, not a whiteboard.

Today I train operations leaders, administrators, and working professionals — the people running the day-to-day, not the people writing the code. I’m currently delivering AI literacy training for private businesses and nonprofit organizations across Central Florida, and producing Eureka Moments, an AI literacy series for people who want the real version without the jargon.

The career didn’t change direction. Twenty years of fixing how work gets done, pointed at the biggest shift in how work gets done that any of us will see.

And the moment someone’s face changes because it finally clicked? That’s still the whole job.