AI Intrapreneur

For bold change agents in large organizations, AI is more accessible than ever: most have prototyped a workflow using ChatGPT or Claude, or even vibe-coded their own app. But turning that into an internal or external capability an organization actually adopts and trusts is a different problem than reprompting a bot for an afternoon. Many people building with AI, in product, architecture, foresight, and business-transformation roles alike, haven't yet learned how to facilitate the adoption and acceptance of what they can build. In this Disruptive Diner session, two intrapreneurs, people building real things inside or alongside existing organizations, share what actually gets work supported, adopted, and trusted. Using the Disruptive Diner format for innovation leaders (click here for more details), Jeff will tell his own intrapreneurship story first, one that came easier than most because of the trust he'd already built with RGA leadership; Ed will follow with a look at the repeatable pattern behind it, and what nearly didn't work for the many people who don't start with that same trust already banked.

Want more context before you request to attend? Jeff's Dynaface project page links to the wider coverage it's gotten, and the website for Ed's book, The Inside Job: The Intrapreneur's Toolkit to Mastermind Meaningful Change and Innovation, lays out his approach and how it's worked in many organizations.

Jeffrey Heaton is VP of AI Innovation at RGA, a global reinsurer. He also teaches AI and data science at Washington University in St. Louis. He built his standing at RGA from the inside: starting as a software engineer in the company's IT department, he began sharing AI work publicly on his own time, and RGA's own recruiters found him and moved him into a data science role, right as he was weighing a jump into climate tech instead. He's quick to say he's not an entrepreneur; he's spent 26 years in corporate America, which is exactly why his story matters here. Jeff’s contact info:  Dynaface | LinkedIn | Heaton Research | Heaton Research | YouTube

His talk, “My Dynaface Journey”: After a benign brain tumor removal, and the nerve-graft procedure that followed, left his wife with facial paralysis, Jeff partnered with a physician at Johns Hopkins to build Dynaface, a free app that analyzes video to track facial-nerve recovery, measuring things like how evenly and how quickly each eye closes. He built it from a Python library into a published iOS app in two weeks using Claude Code. It's not a product RGA sells: it's something he built entirely on his own time, and it's since been the subject of a peer-reviewed medical journal publication. When he shared it internally at RGA, so many people signed up to hear about it that the talk moved from a small breakout room to the company's main auditorium. He'll also get into what Dynaface revealed about bias in medical data itself, including how even frontier facial-recognition tools misjudge the exact measurement Johns Hopkins researchers cared about most, a problem that matters directly to a reinsurer built on biometric risk.

Ed Essey spent nearly 25 years at Microsoft, where he became the company's internal expert in helping people pitch and land innovation projects with leadership. He built and led the Business Value program within The Microsoft Garage, Microsoft's grassroots innovation program, and helped take roughly 160 new products to market in a single year. He later reviewed every pitch from Microsoft's company-wide hackathon and coached teams directly on getting ideas funded, including a group of interns whose pitch LinkedIn's CEO later adopted. He's since built a following of over 200,000 people applying the same techniques well beyond Microsoft. Ed's contact info: LinkedIn | EdEssey.com | Ed Essey's Instagram

His talk, "Clearing the Path: How Leaders De-Risk Innovation from Within": Not every intrapreneur starts with the years of earned trust behind Jeff's story. How can leaders create pathways for promising ideas—and the people behind them—to earn that support? Drawing on coaching that helped 85% of the people he worked with secure funding and/or senior leadership support, Ed will explore four sources of perceived risk: the idea, the approach, the person, and the market. With three practical responses to each, he'll show how leaders can help intrapreneurs overcome obstacles, turn polite encouragement into concrete sponsorship, and weigh the opportunity lost through inaction alongside the resources at risk through investment. With AI as the immediate context, the lessons apply to innovation across the company. The talk draws on his book, The Inside Job, a heist-inspired toolkit for unlocking meaningful change from within.

WHAT TO EXPECT: Disruptive Diner sessions are not passive webinars of two experts reading their slides. The session is 75 minutes online, built around two short Pecha Kucha talks (20 slides, 20 seconds each) by Jeff and Ed, and a facilitated discussion with an intimate and curated group of innovation leader peers. A short framing conversation opens the session, then Jeff shares his Dynaface story first; Ed follows with the pattern behind it. Short discussion follows each talk, then the floor opens for peer discussion and synthesis on how innovation leaders can use these ideas to further their own work, before closing thoughts. Presentations are recorded and later published on YouTube; the discussion itself stays confidential in the room, to keep it honest. A short written recap goes out to the Openly Disruptive community afterward.