Susan / An independent research venture

A context engine for human capability.

Every reindustrialization plan assumes the people exist. Shipyards, foundries, satellite lines, munitions plants. Capital is moving, contracts are landing, facilities are breaking ground, and the binding constraint underneath all of it is human capability that nobody can see or count.

The instruments we use are titles, résumés, credentials, historical hiring patterns, and, in most cases, a modern interview process that rewards presentation over demonstrated capability. They flatten people into proxies and tell us almost nothing about capability in context. None tells you whether a person can hold tolerance on a five axis machine, how long it takes to make someone who can, or where that capability is being built right now.

Susan is an early stage context engine building the missing view. I have found a way to index human capability from evidence of real work and, from that index, to map the path to developing more of it.

Expertise is not a data point to extract. It is a human capability formed in relationship with an environment.

The ontology, the research, and the working model are in a private brief.

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Please say who you are and what you are building.

Susan is not a public product launch. It is an active research venture, distinct from The Hire Good's Manufacturing Intelligence and client services, and shared selectively while the model develops.

Why the physical workforce

Things being built reveal what capability actually means.

Aerospace, defense, and manufacturing make the future of work tangible. Ambition eventually has to become an aircraft, a factory, a supply chain, and a workforce capable of delivering it.

AI may change design, planning, inspection, and production, but physical work still depends on judgment, tacit knowledge, skilled hands, and people learning through doing.

The working belief

What should AI reason with?

If AI reasons only from job titles, résumés, credentials, and historical hiring patterns, it inherits a narrow and incomplete view of people.

It should also reason with evidence of what people have built, solved, learned, and become capable of doing, including the environments where that expertise developed.

What I am working on

A richer account of how people become capable.

I am investigating how human expertise is formed, how AI changes what work requires, and whether we can build a more complete record of capability than titles, credentials, and résumés provide.

I am starting in physical industries because the work must be learned, verified, transferred, and ultimately used to build something real.