J. I. Ashley Consulting | Jacob Ashley, MBA

About

The method never changed.
Only the domain did.

Jacob's career looks nonlinear on paper: Army officer, program manager, product delivery lead, strategy consultant, AI systems architect. The through-line is the same discipline applied in every domain: structured analytical thinking under pressure, in unfamiliar territory, with real consequences for being wrong.

Military service taught a specific craft: making high-consequence assessments from imperfect information, and knowing exactly how much to trust them. Detecting when a source is unreliable under pressure turns out to be structurally identical to detecting when a language model is hallucinating. The same discipline transfers: structure the question, constrain the response space, cross-reference the outputs, verify before you trust. That craft now shapes how he builds AI systems.

U.S. Army. Program leadership across a 500-person organization and a $350M+ portfolio. Authored a counter-drone framework adopted enterprise-wide.
MBA, Portland State. Co-managed a $700K student investment fund to a 41% return, Top 3 risk-adjusted across 20+ universities.
Defense Language Institute. Persian Farsi, Honors, top 10% of class.
PMP certified. Prior product delivery for Nike, Verizon, NurseGrid (100K users in year one), and SENSEI (Environmental Product of the Year).
J. I. Ashley Consulting LLC. Founded 2022. San Francisco, CA.

Work

Built, shipped, and running.

Flagship

SMTRY · AI memory infrastructure

An AI infrastructure company built around one conviction: the knowledge inside your work is your most valuable asset, and most AI tools throw it away at the end of every session. SMTRY builds the memory layer that protects it, compounds it, and puts it to work. The architecture is grounded in cognitive science and runs in production today.

smtry.ai Anamnesis: give your AI a memory

Live product

Anamnesis

Persistent, encrypted memory for the AI tools you already use. Sessions are captured as they happen, distilled into typed memories, and carried into every new conversation. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI. Designed, built, and operated end to end: architecture, pipeline, security model, product surface.

anamnesis.smtry.ai

Proof of concept

Quantitative trading system

A fully autonomous trading research platform: Bayesian parameter optimization, a hybrid decision engine, and two-tier risk governance validated against 25 years of historical market data. Built in weeks, not quarters, as the first proof that the memory architecture compounds.

Delivery record

Product & program delivery

A decade of shipping for names you know: Nike, Verizon, NurseGrid, SENSEI. Later, intelligence programs at enterprise scale. Different stakes, same job: understand the system, find the constraint, deliver the thing.

Foundation

Military leadership

Eight years in the Army: program management at enterprise scale, structured analytical methods, and assessments that decision-makers bet on. The discipline that now underwrites every system he builds: verify before you trust, and design for the case where you are wrong.

Services

Selectively available.

J. I. Ashley Consulting takes a small number of engagements where the fit is right. If your problem lives at the intersection of systems, software, and strategy, start a conversation.

Software solutions

Custom systems designed and built end to end: AI integration, memory and knowledge infrastructure, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes it dependable.

AI strategy

What to build, what to buy, and what to ignore. Grounded in running production AI systems daily, not in slideware.

Business consulting

Program delivery, analytical process design, and decision frameworks from someone who has run them at enterprise scale and under pressure.

Jacob Ashley, MBA

The method never changed.Only the domain did.