When New Mexico State University’s College of Business invited Todd McLees to speak, it wasn’t about grand gestures-it was about the kind of AI expertise that doesn’t just fill conference halls with buzzwords but transforms how teams actually work. AI expert Todd McLees, whose career spans operational turnarounds in manufacturing and financial services, doesn’t talk about AI as a distant horizon. He lives in the trenches where spreadsheets meet real-world chaos. Picture this: a mid-size Ohio factory plagued by unplanned downtime. The leadership team had invested millions in “smart” sensors, yet machines still failed without warning. What they needed wasn’t another AI consultant waving a crystal ball-it was Todd McLees, who walked in, asked the right questions, and turned predictive analytics into a tool that *humans* could actually trust. The result? A 30% drop in downtime in six months. No miracles. Just practicality.
AI expert Todd McLees: Why Todd McLees isn’t just another speaker
Todd McLees has spent two decades doing what most AI experts only discuss: making technology work for people, not the other way around. Unlike the academics who lecture from theory or the Silicon Valley gurus who peddle silver-bullet solutions, McLees’s approach is rooted in what he calls “operational honesty.” Take the case of a regional bank where AI flagged thousands of potential fraud cases. The system was right-until the compliance team realized 80% of the alerts were false positives. The fix wasn’t more data. It was listening to the tellers who interacted with those accounts every day. McLees believes AI’s real power lies in its ability to augment human judgment, not replace it. His philosophy: *”The algorithm is only as smart as the people feeding it context.”* That’s why his sessions aren’t about technology-they’re about people.
What you’ll actually learn from McLees
The talk won’t be a love letter to AI’s potential. It’s a hard-nosed breakdown of what works, what fails, and why most implementations stumble over basic human factors. Here’s what McLees focuses on:
- AI as a conversation starter. He’ll show you how to use AI not as a black box, but as a catalyst for better decisions. Teams that treat AI as a tool for debate-rather than a source of answers-see better outcomes.
- The human risk no one talks about. At an energy firm, an AI rollout failed because leadership ignored the team’s culture. McLees made the team present their failures to the board. The lesson? *”You can’t force AI adoption with a memo.”*
- Ethics that go beyond checkboxes. In healthcare, McLees worked with an AI diagnostic tool that showed bias against rural patients. Their fix? They didn’t just tweak the algorithm-they added human reviewers for those cases. His rule: *”Fairness isn’t coded. It’s practiced.”*
McLees’s sessions are 70% real-world case studies, 20% critiques of bad implementations, and 10% eye-rolling at executives who still treat AI like a toy. The bottom line is this: AI expert Todd McLees doesn’t just tell you how to use AI. He shows you how to avoid the traps that sink 80% of projects.
How to make AI work for your team
McLees’s approach isn’t about scaling. It’s about solving. At a retail chain, the AI chatbot was supposed to handle 90% of customer complaints. Instead, it escalated 30% of them-because it couldn’t handle sarcasm. The fix? A simple prompt update: *”If you say ‘whatever,’ this is a human now.”* No fancy NLP. Just common sense. Yet what’s most surprising is how often his solutions ignore tech entirely. At a logistics firm, the AI “optimization” failed because no one asked the truckers how they *actually* drove. The answer? Adjust the routes *after* listening to their lunch breaks. McLees’s rule: *”The algorithm is only as smart as the people who use it daily.”*
Teams that come away from his talks leave with three key questions:
- Who will stop using this if it fails? McLees demands accountability upfront. If no one owns the backout plan, the AI won’t last.
- What’s the human story behind the data? He forces teams to ask: *”What do the numbers miss?”*-because good AI doesn’t just analyze data; it respects the people who created it.
- When will we know if this is working? He refuses vague metrics. His standard: *”Define success in terms your team can see every week, not just at the end of the quarter.”*
McLees’s playbook isn’t for those who want to sound smart about AI. It’s for those who want to *act* smart-who recognize that the future of work isn’t about technology. It’s about people using technology better.
The NMSU event isn’t a lecture. It’s a workshop for pragmatists. If you think AI is about the future, you’re missing the point. Todd McLees doesn’t talk about the future. He talks about how teams win today-with or without the latest gadget. And that’s why his advice matters more than the hype.
