Rick Sato, Principal Consultant, Toronto
Turning operational and communication challenges into working, AI‑enabled systems.
When you’ve got information that’s technically all there — documents, records, an archive, a knowledge base — but no one can actually find or trust what’s in it, I turn it into something you can rely on. Often the problem isn’t the tool; it’s that the information underneath it is stale, duplicated, or contradicts itself. Fixing that is the real work.
When a manual process is eating time and starts to strain as volume grows, I build the system that runs it. The judgment is knowing where not to automate — the one step where a wrong answer does real damage stays with a person. “Just automate it” usually creates more problems than it solves; doing it right doesn’t.
Sometimes you just need it made — a website, a tool, a working system — designed properly and delivered, not left as a half‑finished project. Fifteen years of design and delivery behind it, now built faster with AI doing the heavy lifting and judgment deciding what’s worth keeping.
I’ll tell you where AI won’t help as readily as where it will. Most of what’s sold as AI is oversold — the useful version is narrower, more honest, and more reliable. That’s the version I build.
Independent consulting for a small set of ongoing clients — marketing and automation systems from the start, deepening into AI‑enabled systems as the tools matured. I started working with AI tools in 2023, began applying them to real client work in 2024, and by early 2026 they were central to how I work.
A client relationship since 2018, beginning with marketing automation — the workflows and systems that became the backbone of the AI‑enabled work, and ongoing today.
Ran marketing and CRM systems for a Microsoft Dynamics partner — the step from design into automation and data‑driven operations.
Ran a design and communications firm: 500+ brands across nonprofit, government, education, healthcare, and commercial clients; retained public‑sector clients through open competitive bidding.
2026 · Automation with a human where it matters
Replaced a manual, error-prone water-billing process across two properties with a system that automates the billing while keeping a human at the one step that matters.
2026 · Client delivery
Took a complex, emotionally charged personal record that read as a series of blog posts and rebuilt it as a neutral document library — a record people can navigate, examine, and request access to, rather than a message that reads as pleading a case.
2026 · A system that tunes itself on its own evidence
Built a system that runs twice a week across seven sources and reads two different kinds of signal — contract and tender postings already shaped like my work, and organizations publicly admitting an operational problem with budget attached. It tiers what it finds, remembers what it has already seen, and surfaces only what needs a human. Runs unattended.
2026 · When the reasoning survives but the evidence doesn’t
Rebuilt a knowledge base that looked complete and was effectively useless — good structure and narrative, but most of the document links behind it were dead. Every claim now traces to a source document that can actually be produced; what couldn’t be sourced is flagged rather than quietly left standing.
2025–2026 · From chaos to a searchable, structured system
Turned a sprawling multi-decade document archive for a complex legal matter into a usable, searchable, structured system — and kept finding that the archive’s own records of itself were wrong.
The best place to start is a short conversation about what’s actually stuck. No pitch — I’ll tell you honestly whether it’s something I can help with.
Or send a message here.