Sean W. Smith · Business Expert Press · 2025 · ISBN 978-1-63742-814-6
About bringing AI into an organization on purpose: who it works with, who it answers to, and how to keep it doing what was intended.
Recent posts
- Oct 24, 2026 — Slides from my talk at DevFest Troy, “Machines That Learn on the Job.”
- Ongoing — Working on the second book, The Physics of Governance. Nine chapters, still in draft.
- Apr 2025 — Influence Design in the AI Era is out from Business Expert Press.
The next book · coming 2027
The Physics of Governance
How digital ecosystems will reshape the way we work, build and lead. Book 2 of Influence Design in the AI Era.
The first book was about what organizations should do about AI. This one is about how it actually behaves once they do: teams of AI agents that each have an identity, someone they answer to and limits they can't go past — and that get better at their jobs without being retrained.
Chapters
- A Shift to Ecosystems
- The Team That Doesn't Sleep
- Where Machines Live
- Same Physics, Different Current
- Bounded Minds
- The Pacemaker Principle
- The Operator's Chair
- Momentum Beats Intelligence
- The Operator's Decade
Want a note when it's out? Email sean@fluxive.ai and I'll let you know.
Books
- The Physics of Governance — the second book. In draft, coming 2027.
- Behavior & Programmable Surfaces — the third. Planned.
Talks
Machines That Learn on the Job — DevFest Troy, October 24, 2026.
How a system earns the trust of the people it works for: one correction, one rule and one step at a time. Slides (47)
What I research
Mostly questions like these. Nothing exotic — just the things I keep coming back to.
- How organizations take on new technology, and what changes in the way people work.
- How decisions get made when people and automated systems share the work.
- Who is accountable for what, and how anyone can tell.
- Why good intentions drift over time, and how small changes add up.
- Governance as something you design, not only something you write down.
Areas of study
- Organizations and AI
- How teams bring AI into their work, and how they keep it doing what they meant it to do. This is the subject of the books.
- Governed computing
- Processor architecture. Today's chips check whether code is allowed to run; the question here is how hardware could also check whether an action is supposed to happen.
- Applied AI research
- Small, practical experiments, written up when there is something worth saying.
About
I'm Sean W. Smith. I write the Influence Design in the AI Era books and give the occasional talk. Before this I spent twenty-some years in ocean science, public-sector work and data and AI companies.
Fluxive Inc. is the small company I research and publish through — a registered business in Saratoga Springs, New York, run by our family. Most of the work is reading, writing and building small things to test an idea; some of it turns into a book or a talk, and the rest stays in notebooks.
Company details
For anyone who needs the paperwork.
- Legal name
- Fluxive Inc. (Delaware corporation)
- Founded
- January 2024
- Location
- Saratoga Springs, New York
- SAM.gov
- Registered · UEI YCAFLE6CSKV5 · CAGE 19QJ4
- Contact
- sean@fluxive.ai
Contact
Email me at sean@fluxive.ai. Questions about the books, the research or a talk are all welcome.