- Wild lapsang
- almonicha
- Benifuki
About
Hi, I’m Ron Bronson — I work in deployment and interaction policy, helping large institutions ship tech and AI. Based in Portland, Oregon.
I’ve spent my career learning how public systems fail in small ways that compound, and building the capacity inside institutions to catch those failures before they cascade. I spent nearly a decade at 18F, the federal government’s digital services unit, leading design across agencies including the VA, IRS, HHS, and DOD. That work taught me what delivery actually looks like inside bureaucracies that resist it — and how to build teams that ship anyway.
Now I run Occupant and State Capacity AI, teach at the University of Michigan, and write at Making Public Work. If your project is too important to leave the gap between pilot and product to chance, let’s talk.
Past and present
- 18F
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Internal Revenue Service
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Department of Defense
- Federal Trade Commission
- University of Michigan
- Portland Digital Corps
- PDX Design Month
Deployment and interaction policy
I work where policy meets delivery — the layer where an institution’s rules, incentives, and staff patterns meet the technology it’s trying to use. Most large programs stall there. Procurement commits to vendors the operating teams can’t support. Pilots get approval without a path to production. AI arrives without the decision infrastructure it needs to be trusted.
Through Occupant, I advise state, local, and federal leadership on stabilizing stalled programs, resetting deployment plans that aren’t working, and building the internal capacity a program needs to outlast the engagement. Most of the work is diagnostic before it’s constructive: figuring out where ownership got lost, where a decision broke, or what an org actually has to be good at before the next thing ships.
Decision infrastructure for institutional AI
State Capacity AI is the product side of the same problem. Governments and large institutions are being sold AI faster than they can evaluate it, and the intelligence that would let them compare vendors, track real costs, or benchmark performance doesn’t exist in a form they can actually use.
State Capacity AI builds that intelligence: live procurement benchmarks, honest pricing, and decision infrastructure that surfaces what vendors obscure. It’s for the decision-makers who need vendor intelligence without the sales pitch.
Public speaking
I speak with leadership teams, conferences, and institutional audiences about deploying AI in public-sector contexts, what capacity actually looks like inside bureaucracies, and why most digital-transformation work is repair more than reinvention.
Teaching
I’m an Assistant Professor of Practice in Urban Technology at the University of Michigan, where I teach students how to work on public-sector systems that don’t want to be worked on. The courses sit at the intersection of design, policy, and delivery — the same territory I’ve been practicing in my whole career.
Writing
I write Making Public Work, a newsletter on public-sector technology and institutional capacity; longer essays at blog.ronbronson.com; and occasional pieces on game design and sports at Sideline Engineering.
Coaching
Head Girls Varsity Tennis Coach at Catlin Gabel School in Portland. State champion, district titles, and a constraint-led approach focused on developing problem-solvers on the court.
Learn more about my coachingCurrent Favorites
- Pantheon
- Counterpart
- The Night Agent
- Nocturnaility (Arquisite)
- Apricot in Cognac (Scents of Wood)
Also, I’m unreasonably enthusiastic about pesäpallo.