Cloud & AI
Microsoft Azure
Storage and Networking portal experiences. Onboarding rebuilt around customer intent, a continuous experimentation system, and the product-led growth motion.
AI Product Cloud Infrastructure Leadership Research Learning Systems Product-Led Growth
Ryan Currie, PhD
Scaling the human as fast as the system.
AI product executive at Microsoft. Leadership researcher. Author of Human at Scale. I have spent two decades building the products that sit between what a system can do and what a person can actually use, at Starbucks, T-Mobile, REI, and Microsoft.
20+
Years product leadership
$250M+
P&L owned at REI
PhD
Leadership Studies, Gonzaga
1
Granted Microsoft patent
The through-line
The constraint was never the technology.
It was whether people could find their way into it, trust it, and grow with it. That is true of a loyalty program with fifteen million members and it is true of a cloud platform with a million developers.
The system sets the ceiling. Leadership decides how much of it anyone ever reaches.
So I went and studied it. The findings are on this site, along with the work that raised the question in the first place.
Four proofs, one argument
Lead
I have built it at scale
Product strategy for Azure Storage and Networking, serving millions of developers and enterprise customers. Before that, REI Co-op Membership and Starbucks Rewards.
Build
I am not standing outside it
Python, SQL, experimentation systems, and a granted Microsoft patent on generating learning content from structured skill data. I read the telemetry myself.
Research
I studied the question
A doctorate in Leadership Studies from Gonzaga, with a dissertation on leadership for the AI-native skills economy. Five findings, from leaders already inside it.
Teach
I make capability transferable
Microsoft Learn, developer onboarding, and a book for the leaders deciding right now whether AI expands human capability or merely extracts it.
Selected work
Co-op Membership
REI
Commerce, membership, and enterprise personalization. A $250M+ P&L against a $30M variable budget, 8:1 ROI, roughly 20% growth year over year.
Rewards
Starbucks
Loyalty, 1:1 personalization, and the launch of mobile order and pay. Revenue on owned channels grew at two to three times the annual rate.
Human at Scale
Leading innovation when
AI changes everything
The book
Most organizations are wiring AI to the old shaft locations.
In 1900, factories bolted electric motors exactly where the steam shaft had been, kept the old floor, and got the modest gains you would expect. The ones that redesigned the floor around what electricity actually made possible saw gains that compounded for decades. The technology was identical. The difference was what leaders chose to do with it.
Read the premise
Manuscript complete · Representation in progress
Five findings
From a 2026 doctoral study of leaders in enterprise technology organizations working through AI transformation.
01
Leadership is shifting from direction to sensemaking.
02
Productivity gains are real but never institutionalized.
03
Tool access is outrunning the learning infrastructure.
04
Learning happens in the flow of work, but scattered.
05
Skill formation is outpacing every credential system.