Scott Howell is a consultant and systems developer who has spent his career figuring out how technology actually works — and how to explain it to people who need to know without becoming engineers themselves.

Based in Dover, Tennessee, Scott comes to AI not from academia or a Silicon Valley lab, but from decades of building and integrating real systems for real organizations. He has watched the internet evolve from the ground up, navigated the cycles of hype that define every new technology wave, and developed a deep allergy to explanations that sound impressive but explain nothing. That allergy is where this book came from.

Actually Understanding AI reflects what Scott wished had existed when he first started digging seriously into how these systems work: a book that respects the reader's intelligence, skips the hand-waving, and goes all the way down to the foundation. He believes that understanding AI — truly understanding it — is not only possible for non-technical readers, it's necessary.

When he's not consulting or building something out of wood, Scott can be found in rural Tennessee — a place he's found to be the ideal location for thinking clearly about technology: close enough to use it, far enough to see it honestly.

Scott is also the creator of learn.tgifriday.com, the free AI-literacy curriculum that grew alongside this book and is used by professionals across industries.

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