Thesis

AI that makes the person using it more capable, not less necessary.

Twenty years building software that talks to people. Now independent, and building tools that remember the person they are for.

Work

  1. 2022–now
    47north
    Founder and principal consultant. Building Ava, a personal AI with cross-channel memory and real-time voice. Active engagements in agentic systems.
  2. 2018–2022
    Google
    Senior TPM on the Google Cloud Data Analytics UI organization. Unified the product surface and cleared two billion dollars of public-sector revenue.
  3. 2016–2018
    Apple
    Senior engineering PM on Siri. Owned the Siri in the Car and Smarthome programs. Drove Siri Privacy.
  4. 2013–2016
    Nuance
    Principal PM for Dragon Drive, Nuance's automotive voice AI platform. It runs in over 200 million cars today and powers the Mercedes-Benz User Experience (MBUX).
  5. 2001–2003
    Microsoft
    Early agentic prototypes and cross-app orchestration frameworks. Co-inventor, Persona Menu.

On AI

A working note from the frontier.

By Todd Blocksom. Seattle, Washington.

I spent two decades inside the teams that shaped how people talk to computers. Nuance, Apple Siri, Google Cloud. The lesson I carry out of those chapters is that the frontier of AI is not raw capability. It is whether the person using the software becomes more extraordinary at their job because of it, or less so.

I build toward that, and I help other people build toward it. B2B is still person-to-person, no matter how the contract reads. Design around that person, and the rest of the stack has a point.

If you are building something ambitious in AI and want a product leader who has been at the frontier a while, I would like to hear about it.

Write to todd@47northtech.com, or find me on LinkedIn.