Brian Connelly — AI Consultant · Systems Architect

The Consulting Philosophy

Knowing what to do with AI is harder than knowing how.

Organizations that approach AI with "what can we do with this?" end up with expensive pilots that don't scale and solutions searching for problems. The ones that succeed start by mapping where critical knowledge actually lives — and where it goes wrong when people aren't available, systems fail, or context gets lost.

My background is Knowledge Engineering — the discipline of encoding human expertise into working systems — combined with three decades of large-scale enterprise migrations and integrations. I've been doing this since 1988, before "AI" was a department, when it was called expert systems and it actually had to work.

The question isn't how to use AI. It's what you need it to know, and what happens when it gets it wrong.

"The organizations that fail at AI don't fail because they chose the wrong tool. They fail because they never asked what the tool was supposed to know."

— Brian Connelly, Piketown Enterprises Inc.

Selected Work

Called in when it had to work.

The common thread across thirty years of engagements: high stakes, tight constraints, and a client who needed the problem fixed — not analyzed.

IBM

The Expert Said "We Don't Do Automation"

Fernando Flores — pioneer of Language Action theory and automated workflow — had just completed a landmark analysis for IBM Parts Distribution. When IBM asked if his firm could automate it, Flores replied simply: "We don't do automation." IBM needed someone who could implement the very methodology Flores had designed. That became my inaugural project with WorkGroup Associates: principal architect and trainer for the first commercial Language Action workflow implementation.

First production implementation of Flores/Winograd Language Action methodology for IBM Parts Distribution

GE Asset Management

Turning Research Reputation into Revenue

GEAM's financial research had a stellar reputation across the investment community. The challenge: delivering proprietary documents to paying subscribers across organizational boundaries, at high volume, with document-level access control. The solution required cross-company directory federation (Netegrity SiteMinder), clustered Domino.doc delivery, and subscription-based asset access control. The engagement was extended 18 months after initial delivery.

Extended 18 months post-completion · Enterprise-scale subscription document delivery with cross-org federation

HSBC — Wall Street

20 Days or Pay for Empty Floors

HSBC traders couldn't relocate to new midtown offices until a Wall Street email migration was complete. Building leases on floors that would sit vacant were about to renew — hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. The brief: migrate and train all traders in 20 days. "We know it's impossible," I was told. "Give it your best shot." We delivered ahead of schedule. HSBC took the entire consulting firm to dinner.

Delivered under 20 days · Six-figure lease renewal avoided · Full trader migration and training complete

AT&T WorldPartners

From 30 Days to 24 Hours

WorldPartners — a cooperative of international telecoms competing with MCI — was losing on quote speed. MCI quoted in a week. WorldPartners needed 30 days to coordinate across partners with different languages, currencies, and no shared CRM. Using Language Action workflow, automatic translation, and currency consensus built on Lotus Notes/Domino, we reduced the quote cycle to 24 hours — delivered to the customer in their own language and currency.

Quote cycle: 30 days → 24 hours · Native language and currency delivery across all international partners

Novartis

Four Months When the Vendor Needed Twelve

The vendor contracted to migrate 5,000 interconnected applications over 12 months had failed to deliver. With 2,500 users and an immovable training deadline, delaying the migration would cascade into downstream costs across the organization. Running dual developer shifts day and night, we delivered all applications before the training deadline — ahead of schedule, under budget. The hands-on project team was astounded.

Delivered in 4 months vs. vendor's failed 12-month timeline · 2,500 users · Dual-shift development

Published Works

Five books. One through-line.

The monetary system isn't broken — it's working exactly as designed. These books explain the hundred-year history, the personal cost, and what to do about it.

Book I

Before Satoshi

A Hundred Year History of Bitcoin — How Energy Became Money

Since the 1880s, Nobel laureates, engineers, and visionaries asked one radical question: what if money measured something real? From Henry Ford's energy currency proposal to the Cypherpunks, every piece of the puzzle was assembled over a century. In 2008, Satoshi solved it — without permission, without an institution, using only math and physics. Bitcoin wasn't invented. It was inevitable.

View on Amazon →

Book II

After Satoshi

A 73-Year-Old Systems Architect's Sardonic Guide to the Money Revolution Nobody Told You About

In September 2008, Brian asked his mortgage servicer a simple question: "Who holds my mortgage?" The silence that followed changed how he saw everything. Five months later, a ghost named Satoshi Nakamoto posted nine pages to an obscure cryptography mailing list. Nobody read it. They should have. This is the story of what happened next.

View on Amazon →

Book III

The Smell of Smoke

When Money Breaks

What does civilizational denial about money look like? Exactly like personal denial about addiction. A brutally honest diagnosis of a totaled financial system — written by someone who lost his home in 2008 and spent a decade looking for a system that actually works. Applies the hard-won principles of recovery to global finance. Bitcoin as the TCP/IP of money: an open protocol that no one can shut down.

View on Amazon →

Book IV

Bitcoin: How to Keep Your Hodler Alive and Well

A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Crypto Noob

You bought Bitcoin. Congratulations. Now you have a choice: leave it on Coinbase like everyone else and hope nothing goes wrong — or actually own what you paid for. Inspired by John Muir's legendary VW Beetle manual: the same irreverent honesty, the same assumption that you deserve to understand what you own. Step-by-step from exchange to self-custody. Each chapter has checkpoints. No skipping ahead.

View on Amazon →

Book V

Alice in Bitcoin Land

The Rabbit Hole Companion: A Parent's Guide to Money and Logic

Lewis Carroll wrote a children's book about logic disguised as nonsense. This book reveals that our monetary system might be nonsense disguised as logic. Alice tumbles into a Wonderland where the Mad Hatter's watch tracks Block Height and the Queen's rules change whenever she pleases. A family primer on money, critical thinking, and the courage to ask "but why?" — with a chapter-by-chapter discussion guide for parents.

View on Amazon →

Weekly Writing

Bitcoin Without the Buzzwords.

Weekly articles for curious people who want the story, not the sermon. No laser eyes. No cult recruitment. Just the history, the mechanics, and the implications — explained by someone old enough to remember what they're replacing.

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Connelly Bitcoin Partners

The home for weekly long-form articles on Bitcoin, monetary history, and financial systems — written for skeptics and curious minds. Honest about Bitcoin's risks, limitations, and the human folly that surrounds any new technology.

Read the Articles →

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Brian Connelly — Articles

All articles in one place — searchable, browsable, right here on this site. Bitcoin history, monetary systems, and the human story behind the technology. No sign-up required.

Browse All Articles →

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On Medium

Selected articles cross-posted to Medium for readers who live there. Each piece originally published at Connelly Bitcoin Partners.

Follow on Medium →

About Brian

Two careers. One through-line.

Before I built fault-tolerant systems for Fortune 500 companies, I spent eleven years as a clinical social worker in Newark. Both jobs taught me the same thing: systems behave exactly as they're designed to behave. The question is whether the design includes you.

I've been in technology since 1988 — knowledge engineering at XICOM and John Hancock, enterprise architecture at GE, HSBC, AT&T, IBM, Novartis, and others, through WorkGroup Associates and Piketown Enterprises. I've been writing about Bitcoin since 2019 and have five books in print through Amazon KDP.

I hold an MIT FinTech Certificate and was trained in Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd's Language as Action methodology — the theoretical framework behind the first commercial workflow system. My consulting practice applies the same knowledge-first discipline to AI adoption that I applied to enterprise workflow thirty years ago.

I'm 73 years old and have too many opinions about money.

Get in Touch

Let's talk about the problem.

Consulting inquiries, speaking engagements, or questions about the books. I respond within one business day.

Brian Connelly · Piketown Enterprises Inc.

Email brian@brianconnelly.com

Location Pennsylvania, USA

Books Amazon Author Page →

Writing Articles →

CBP ConnellyBitcoinPartners.com →

I take on a limited number of consulting engagements each year. If you're looking for someone to write a report about your problem, I'm not the right fit. If you have a system that needs to work — and it doesn't — let's talk.

Agentic AI is rewriting how organizations work.

Knowing what to do with AI is harder than knowing how.

Called in when it had to work.

The Expert Said "We Don't Do Automation"

Turning Research Reputation into Revenue

20 Days or Pay for Empty Floors

From 30 Days to 24 Hours

Four Months When the Vendor Needed Twelve

Five books. One through-line.

Before Satoshi

After Satoshi

The Smell of Smoke

Bitcoin: How to Keep Your Hodler Alive and Well

Alice in Bitcoin Land

Bitcoin Without the Buzzwords.

Connelly Bitcoin Partners

Brian Connelly — Articles

On Medium

Background & Credentials

Two careers. One through-line.

Let's talk about the problem.

Brian Connelly · Piketown Enterprises Inc.