Tim Fisher

As VP of AI, I partner closely with editorial, marketing, and product leads to demystify AI, champion responsible adoption, and spark meaningful conversations with our audience of modern professionals and business leaders. My goal at BWZ is to elevate our thought leadership around AI while guiding internal teams on how to use these tools effectively, ethically, and creatively. I serve as a bridge between emerging AI capabilities and real-world use cases, both inside and outside the organization.

I operate Fisher Services LLC as a small consultation firm, specializing in business process improvements via custom-designed technology solutions. Specifically, these solutions often manifest as custom dashboards, browser extensions, mobile apps, or other software. My largest client is a 1000+ employee, Fortune 500 corporation which currently utilizes a browser add-on I developed from scratch that interfaces with their proprietary systems to greatly reduce process overhead. Increasingly, specific solutions involve incorporating AI/LLM augmentations to a client's existing processes to enable higher output at lower costs.

As People Inc.'s (formerly Dotdash Meredith) SVP AI Operations, I oversaw the company's use of generative AI. I acted as the strategic driver of these new technologies and methodologies and was responsible for the adoption of AI as a business function, owning the successful integration of these groundbreaking capabilities across the company. My specific remit was to fully leverage the ever-evolving incarnations of generative AI for enhanced productivity, a larger and more engaged audience across the company's many brands, additional revenue, and other competitive advantages. With my AI Operations group, we played a number of critical roles as generative AI experts, team liaisons, educators, culture-builders, product and engineering partners, and more. Collectively, we ensured that generative AI wasn't a stamp to apply everywhere but instead a tool we used in appropriate ways to drive real value for the business.

As Group General Manager of the Tech and Sustainability group, I was primarily in charge of managing the Lifewire brand for People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith). In this role, I was responsible for the entire business, from content strategy, to product vision, to brand evangelism. I was charged with launching the Lifewire brand from existing About Tech content in October, 2016. This was an incredibly exciting opportunity as it allowed me to create an online brand from scratch but with existing expert-created content developed over the previous 15 years. After it's launch in late 2016, I took Lifewire from a brand new player in the technology news and information space to a consistently Top 10 technology site (per Comscore) and driving many millions of dollars of revenue. In addition to Lifewire, I was similarly responsible for nine additional brands, including the company's sustainability site, Treehugger, four smaller brands including ThoughtCo, LiveAbout, Learn Religions, and About Espanol, and the digital sites for Wood Magazine, American Patchwork and Quilting, Midwest Living, and Successful Farming. I worked closely with senior leadership across the organization to ensure I met the financial, traffic, and brand goals outlined within my own strategies and those of the company. This necessitated a deep understanding of not only my brands from editorial and sales perspectives, but of every aspect of the business and how it all works together, including product, design, engineering, growth, data sciences, research, operations, ad tech, and more.

As the official/unofficial AI business lead for People Inc. (formally Dotdash Meredith), my responsibility was to ensure that our strategies for, and applications of, Artificial Intelligence (AI), including Large Language Models (LLMs), are aligned with business goals. In this capacity, I worked closely with our product, engineering, and brand teams on a range of helpful uses of AI technologies across the business. Specifically, my role involved investigating, planning, and guiding the execution of LLM-augmented internal process improvements. Additionally, considering the nascent nature of this technology and its applications, much of my time was spent on internal education around the opportunities, and challenges, of generative AI in the workplace. This role evolved into my later role of SVP AI Operations.

For 17 years, I created original content as a contracted technology expert, first for About Tech and then Lifewire after its launch as a spin-off brand from About in 2016. This was a yearly-renewed contract position that saw me not only creating new technology content but also keeping my growing corpus updated. My main focus was on technology support topics in the form of troubleshooting guides, tutorials, and reference material. Specifically, I wrote extensively about Windows, Android, smart homes, networking, 5G, and hundreds of other smaller hardware and software topics. Over this time, I drove hundreds of millions of views to my many thousands of articles, helping each and every one of those readers find a solution to a problem, a shortcut to save time, or education and advice exactly when they needed it. This opportunity allowed me to help people at a scale I never imagined possible. Throughout this time, my writing was quoted or referenced in a number of major online and print publications including The New York Times, Forbes, Scientific American, Vice, Computerworld, Engadget,, Yahoo Finance, Gizmodo, PCMag, Huffington Post, Lifehacker, and hundreds of other sites. Considering the nature of my writing, it has also been frequently referred to in corporate support documentation at companies like Intel, Adobe, Mozilla, Vimeo, Cisco, Square, HP, Grammarly, and Wordpress. Even the Library of Congress has referenced my work. My content has also been used as expert references for well over 100 Wikipedia pages. In September, 2023, my longstanding contract with Lifewire ended to give me more time to focus on my expanding roles with People Inc. (formally Dotdash Meredith).

During my time at Target as Systems Engineer, I was primarily responsible for delivering support across a complex mix of clientele and technologies within our local distribution center (DC) comprising over 500 users. My responsibilities spanned across a mix of platforms and technologies, from administering Cisco-centric network devices to providing support for Windows and UNIX servers. Beyond traditional business operations hardware, the nature of the DC environment, with its automation and robotic augmentations, allowed me to gain familiarity with a number of proprietary hardware systems and their unique challenges interfacing with traditional networks. A significant highlight of my tenure at Target was my instrumental role in both the conceptualization and deployment of the DC-level IT support knowledge base system. This initiative, born out of a need for streamlined support processes, greatly improved our troubleshooting efficacy. Complementing this, I architected a SharePoint-driven self-support system, eventually adopted by every other DC in the US.

At Birch Telecom, I took on the role of IT Engineer, specializing in the networking aspects of our evolving telecommunications products and services. My initial responsibilities involved the installation and servicing of telecommunications products, specifically computer-based voicemail solutions from a number of companies. I eventually became proficient in installing, maintaining, and supporting a new category of IP-based business telephone systems and related products. This was a fun and challenging opportunity because I was a critical new addition to a team of traditional telephone systems engineers, helping the company move into a new world of more advanced telephony products. As part of this role, I also created educational materials and provided training to installers. As Birch Telecom continued to evolve, I was at the forefront of our foray into the realm of pure networking solutions, at the time tailored to small to medium-sized organizations. This evolution saw me delving into a broader spectrum of tasks including systems design, complex routing, and QoS. Specifically, I installed and configured routers, switches, APs, and state-of-the-art wireless P2P systems into our clients' existing infrastructures.

During my tenure at PDS, a local computer and networking services company in the small city where I went to school, I wore many hats that allowed me to build wide variety of technical and processional skills. Most of my responsibilities included custom-building Windows-based PCs, tailoring each system to the specific needs of our home and business clients. I was also tasked with providing on-site support at our customer's locations, drop-off support at our downtown storefront and office space, as well as remote support for our few clients at the time with a fast internet connection. It was this troubleshooting experience in particular that helped refine my innate loves of problem solving and communicating, which then led me through every career move afterwards. While I can't say it was one of the most technically challenging parts of my job, I was also involved in numerous Ethernet cabling projects, from short runs in existing homes to larger commercial projects with hundreds of drops. Let's just say I got *really* good at terminating Cat 5. On the ISP front, I helped manage our DSL, ISDN, and T1 connection offerings. While this was a third-party offering at PDS, we acted as the consumer-facing entity that managed all aspects from setup to troubleshooting to disconnects.