CDO | AI Infrastructure & P3 Partnerships | Building Beautiful, Resilient Business

Everyone told me to think strategically. Plan ahead. Play chess.

I tried. For 20 years, I tried.

Then I survived a heart attack, open heart surgery, and a global pandemic that should have killed my business.

That’s when I learned: Business isn’t chess. It’s composition.

Chess is adversarial. Two players. Zero-sum. Someone wins, someone loses.

Composition is collaborative. Multi-dimensional. Designed for everyone to benefit.

And in complex infrastructure deals—data centers, P3 partnerships, Agentic AI governance—composition wins every time.

The Canvas, Not The Concrete

When most people think of infrastructure, their minds default to hardware. They think of the skeletal network of cities: the massive pipes, the electrical grids, the bridges, the tunnels, the airports. They see the requirement.

I see the canvas.

Take the desert. In a vacuum, it’s harsh and empty. But if you solve the infrastructure problem—if you figure out how to move water from a highly populated area to the sand—you create a marvel. You get the Hoover Dam. You get the power grid. You get the story of Las Vegas.

I look at that infrastructure and I don’t just see concrete; I see a place where the human element exists. It is the stage upon which the collaborative element of humanity performs.

The Death of the “Hostage” Model

For decades, businesses treated this canvas like a battlefield. The old-school casino model, for example, aimed to hold the customer hostage, extracting every dollar before they walked out the door. If a guest left to eat at a local spot, that was viewed as a loss. It was adversarial. It was chess.

But over time, it became clear that the client is interested in the world around them. Holding them hostage isn’t the answer.

So, the mindset shifted to multidimensional equity. Now, the casino owner partners with the local restaurant group, the helicopter tour operator, and the city. We moved from capturing the customer to composing an experience for them.

I applied this exact philosophy to a deal that should have been impossible.

The 3.5 Million Square Foot Composition

I was facing a 3.5 million square foot data center deal—the core infrastructure for our modern digital world.

In the old “chess” mindset, this would have been a bloodsport. Landlord vs. Tenant. Power consumption vs. Community resources. Cost vs. Value. If I had played chess, the deal would have died.

Instead, I looked for the composition. I realized we weren’t just building a server farm; we were building an ecosystem with three distinct dimensions:

1. The Economic Dimension: We had to make the numbers work. Profit isn’t a dirty word; it’s the fuel that allows us to do good work.

2. The Social Dimension: We looked at the human element. We focused on job creation and tangible community lifts.

3. The Environmental Dimension: This is the heavy lifter. Infrastructure is resource-intensive. We looked at offsets—bilateral agreements to help with water level rise, repairing rivers, and utilizing carbon credits.

By orchestrating these three elements, we closed a deal that a “chess player” would have walked away from. Everyone won—not because we compromised, but because we composed.

The Agentic Conductor: Infrastructure as a Service

This composition mindset is now mandatory because our infrastructure is becoming Agentic. It is being run by proactive, intelligent systems that don’t just react to data but anticipate needs.

We are integrating Artificial Intelligence and Agentic software into the physical environment. This means our bridges, data centers, power grids, and transit systems are developing a nervous system. They operate not on simple code, but on dynamic goals.

The infrastructure itself is learning how to be a collaborative partner.

Look at a company like Loqiva.

Loqiva isn’t some “AI-first” black box trying to harvest data. It is a smart tool. It builds a Digital Town Hub.

It projects a secure and desirable connection between the user and the place they are standing in, facilitated by agentic technology.

The difference is key: the system isn’t forcing a sale; an agent is proactively anticipating the user’s need based on behavioral data and available resources.

• The user is interested in history? An agent in the Hub provides a note on the historical value of the site and proactively checks for related, discounted access.

• The user is driving? An agent sees the opportunity for a community lift and says, “We’ve got free parking waiting for you down the street. Come.”

This is the future of infrastructure: a proactive, compositional service where Agentic AI connects City Hall with the constituent, or the Visitor Bureau with the tourist, creating value for all stakeholders simultaneously.

The Compositional Framework

Here is the difference between the two mindsets:

Chess Thinking (The Adversarial Mindset)

• Adversarial: It’s me against you.

• Opaque: Thrives on hidden moves (brown paper bags).

• Reactive: Fixes problems after they occur.

• Zero-Sum: For me to succeed, you must fail.

Composition Thinking (The Collaborative Mindset)

• Collaborative: P3 partnerships that resonate together.

• Transparent: Clean, clear, and open.

• Agentic/Proactive: Anticipates and orchestrates outcomes.

• Multi-Dimensional: Economic, Social, and Environmental gains for all.

I’ve built companies from $1,500 to $50M exits using this approach. I’ve negotiated data center deals while recovering from open heart surgery.

Not because I’m tougher than crisis. But because I see patterns and dimensions others miss.

I’m writing about this now because Agentic infrastructure desperately needs this compositional lens. We are building cognitive systems without building governance systems. We are optimizing for processing power without optimizing for human trust.

That’s backwards.

And I’ve spent 20 years learning how to orchestrate complexity into elegance.

More to come.