I'm Dr. James Toles, and I spend my career at the intersection of technology, education, and leadership.

I currently teach at several different universities and colleges, where I lead and supervise other instructors while also teaching in the classroom myself. Prompt engineering is one of the core subjects I teach, and I helped build one of the first undergraduate courses focused specifically on prompt engineering and ethical use of AI. As the subject matter expert on that course, I was responsible for making sure it taught students not just how to use AI effectively, but how to use it responsibly, covering fairness, accountability, safety, transparency, and privacy as real, applied skills rather than abstract ideas.

Beyond the classroom, I bring that same work to a wider audience through public speaking and leadership training, working with CEOs and executive teams on how to lead well, and with young adults just entering the workforce on how to build that same foundation early.

I'm also an author. If you've sat in one of my classes or talks, my books are the longer version of that same conversation.

“The Oversight Illusion: Who's Really Watching AI, Who Should Be, and Who Is Accountable” asks the question most organizations quietly hope nobody puts to them directly: when your AI system makes a decision, who is actually watching it, and who answers for it when something goes wrong? The book pulls apart the comfortable assumption that oversight is happening somewhere, by someone, and replaces it with a clear look at where that assumption breaks down. It's written for anyone responsible for AI in their organization, whether that responsibility is written into their job title or just quietly landed on their desk, and it gives them a real framework for answering the two questions everyone assumes are already answered: who's watching, and who's accountable.

“Steer Your Story” is about taking control, leading with purpose, and creating the life you actually want, rather than the one that happens to you.

Before I moved into education, I spent over 12 years as an enterprise database administrator and database reliability engineer, working hands on with large scale data systems and platform migrations. That background shapes how I think about AI today. I've seen firsthand how much of an AI system's real risk lives in the data itself, not just the model built on top of it.

I hold a Doctor of Business Administration in Organizational Leadership, along with an MBA, a Master of Public Health, and a Master of Science in Cybersecurity. I'm also CISM certified, AWS certified in both Solutions Architecture and AI, and hold several CompTIA credentials, and I am AIGP Certified, Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional.