I need you to picture someone for me.

He's in his early forties. He moved here eight years ago and speaks English well enough to charm anyone on his bus. Passengers love him. In ride-alongs, he's calm, anticipates problems before they happen, and treats every boarding like a small act of hospitality. He is exactly the kind of operator you want representing your agency.

He's also about to fail his CDL test for the third time.

Not because he doesn't know the material, but because he can't translate a 150-page PDF full of technical terminology into written answers. English is his second language and reading has never come easy. He knows how to operate a bus safely and you know it—he just can't get it onto the scantron.

You fail him anyway. He gets a different job.

I recognize the mask of frustration that comes with being capable, yet filtered out. I've worn it for years.

I'm the back-office person who, from the outside, looks to be just chronically late. But behind the scenes, I spin in mental loops, circling the same decisions, stuck in analysis paralysis while deadlines approach. I've carried guilt about this since I was a co-op student. Get the assignment, do the assignment, submit the assignment. Why is that so hard?

For years I thought it was a character flaw. Turns out it was a mismatch between how my brain works and how our systems have demanded I work. Personally, I need a little nudge to get started—and then I follow that momentum all the way to the finish line. Until AI, though, that bump was usually tomorrow’s deadline.

Here's what's changing: AI meets you where you are. AI amplifies your strengths, by helping you fill in the weaknesses that society has left for you to fill yourself.

That operator? Let him hand his training manual to NotebookLM. He may generate a podcast in Spanish, or create visual flashcards. Let him build his own self-guided interactive quiz that explains why he got each question wrong. Let him learn the way his brain actually learns, not the way a PDF assumes everyone must learn. ^{1 See how to explore NotebookLM at the bottom of this email}

Me? AI gets me out of the mud. When I'm spinning, I talk through the loops with Claude or Gemini until the path forward clarifies. It doesn't just change how I learn—it changes how I act. It unsticks me when the friction of starting feels insurmountable (like writing this newsletter!). 

Now picture both of us a year from now.

He's behind the wheel on a Tuesday afternoon, safely guiding his bus through downtown traffic. A regular passenger boards the kneeling bus with a stroller, and he's already moved to help before she asks. "Thanks, Marcus," she says, and he smiles because she remembered his name. At the end of his route, he parks the bus and sits quietly for a moment, letting himself feel what he's built. He passed that test six months ago. The skills were always there, and he’s been empowered to finally show it.

I'm running a business, helping people like you break through in the same way I have: shipping work we’re proud of, supporting our communities, building systems that matter. But more than the output, something has shifted inside of me. I stopped apologizing for how my brain works. I stopped carrying that co-op guilt around like proof of defectiveness, and I’ve come to recognize that my analysis paralysis hasn’t been a bug—it’s thoroughness that thrives under a unique kind of scaffolding. AI gave me that. And with it came something I didn't expect: permission to be myself.

We are two people who almost got filtered out by systems that cared about checkboxes over the mission. Now we’re both thriving alongside our organizations because technology has finally adapted to us instead of demanding we adapt to it.

AI fills in the gaps you were never equipped to fill alone. It doesn't just help the people who were already succeeding, it catches the people the old systems missed.

Now take this one step further: when we accelerate technical training in this way, what opens up? The real reason operators leave isn't CDL knowledge—it's the human moments no manual prepares them for that requires honest judgment: the aggressive passenger, the mental health crisis. What if we had time to train for that instead of memorizing PDFs?

For now, I just want you to sit with this: AI recognizes our individuality. It lets us work the way we actually think. And that means people who never fit the old systems might finally get to shine.

Take it from me: your very own (recovering) scantron bubble.

Transit Intelligence is where I share practical AI insights for transit leaders. Subscribe if this resonates or forward to a colleague who needs it. And hit reply — I read everything.

Go shatter your glass ceiling.