Tech Founder David A. Craig Builds a Digital Workforce With Humans Still in Charge

By Mia Watkins | For the Birmingham Times

David A. Craig compares the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence boom to the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s.

“I know what’s ahead for the way of work and the wealth transfer that’s coming up in 2030,” he said. “There’s a $30 trillion transfer of wealth. I know that right now, we’re in the biggest gold rush since the one in San Franscico. It can be a 14-year-old, it can be a 9-year-old that’s the next millionaire.”

Craig, the founder of ProdigyIQ Technologies, is leaving his own stamp on the AI industry by readying the company’s new flagship product, WorkTelli, for release.

A New Way to Work

He describes it as a workforce infrastructure software aimed at small-to-mid-sized businesses in task-heavy industries such as construction, law and healthcare. The software creates a digital workforce by making agents that talk across all company systems and complete tasks at the direction of a human assignee.

“You can set a goal and give that goal to one of the [digital] workers,” he said. “If it’s not in that worker’s wheelhouse, it will find out what worker does that task and hand it off to them. That worker will start to perform, whether it’s going out and doing research, prospecting, writing proposals, being an executive assistant, handling finances, anything that a person would do. The only thing the person would have to do is make decisions. It gives back evidence before it gives out a deliverable. Once you approve the evidence, it creates a deliverable.”

While he said most AI products are 80-percent accurate, WorkTellli keeps the human element in task assignment by not doing anything a human doesn’t approve.

“You never want to take the human out of the loop because AI isn’t always accurate,” he said. “If you don’t put a countermeasure in place for that 20 percent, it can be detrimental to your organization. A lot of people don’t understand that.”

Craig has been studying AI for 15 years; he’s been formally experimenting with the technology since 2021. He was an early adopter of ChatGPT’s beta version.

“I just was interested in how it works,” he said. “The mathematics behind it and the possibilities. You can’t break it. There’s so much you can do with it in life.”

Craig said he uses AI tools in everyday life to help him manage his ADHD.

“From the time I wake, I know what I need to do for the day,” he said. “I talk to it throughout the day, and I teach it about me. The more it knows about me, the more it can help me. I don’t use it as a tool; I use it as a thinking partner.”

From the Military to Modern Technology

Craig began his career in the military, then moved to engineering and manufacturing before starting his own consulting company in 2020. His latest pivot is into technology, where he participated in programs such as the Voltage Program at Innovation Depot.

Now, he’s focused on what he calls “assignment architecture,” which his website describes as a “discipline for aligning identity, authority, assignment, execution, intelligence and measurable impact across people, teams, organizations and intelligent systems.”

He began developing software, including WorkTelli, in March. He modeled it after the book of Genesis, which he calls the system design document for life.

“If you’re an avid Bible reader, God gave anything he created identity, authority and assignment,” he said. “When I’m onboarding a client onto this platform, the first thing it’s going to do is give an identity. Authority is the guardrails, what it can and can’t do. Assignment is what it’s supposed to do in that role. It’s a whole organization within an organization.”

He was inspired to build Worktelli after having a conversation at a conference in Detroit.

“I met a guy who told me that he’s been looking for someone to build a one-man company all run by AI,” Craig recalled. “I started ideating on it. In January, I built it. I built 21 agents that ran my whole business, from outreach to market intelligence. They did everything. I said, ‘I want to see how I can scale this.’ I scaled what I built as a prototype.”

He said he’s put up to 18 hours a day building the software. WorkTelli is currently in the design partnership stage, and he is actively seeking designers to help him.

A Long History

Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude may be all the rage now, but Craig says that many people don’t know that the technology has been around much longer than most agentic and generative AI software. Artificial intelligence emerged in the 1950s.

“AI’s been around,” he said. “It’s in your car, like Google Assistant, Siri and chatboxes—that’s all AI,” he said.

He likens agentic AI, generative models that solve problems and execute tasks, to having interns.

“Once you start training these interns, they learn how you work, and they get smarter,” Craig said. “Instead of them leaving the company, they become employees. Most interns don’t stay; they go find opportunities. With the technology I designed, it’s like having a bunch of interns that keep getting smarter.”

Craig said that ProdigyIQ Technologies and WorkTelli represent the future of work. He said that if people can harness the power of AI, they can generate wealth for themselves. He pushes back on the idea that AI will take jobs on a massive scale, although he notes that companies are scaling back.

“You can’t resist the move, but you can adapt,” he said. “The way you adapt is you learn how to work with it and not push away from it. The people who are going to win at this race are the ones who integrate AI into their everyday work. The more you know how to use it, the more valuable you are to a company. The companies are looking for people who know how to adapt.”

He said that a lot of people have misconceptions about how AI works.

“People are looking at things through an unlearned lens,” he said. “One thing I had to do was educate myself on the technology. I had to learn what it is and what it’s for. It can help you do a lot real fast, but there are challenges. It’s about putting those protocols into place so it won’t be damaging to society.”

Reaching Out to Others

Part of his work is teaching others what he’s learned through the David A. Craig Institute. He created it to leave a legacy.

“I want to teach people a more holistic way of using AI,” he said. “I came up with the institute where you can get certified as an Intelligence System Architect, which is what I call myself because I design systems around AI, or you can become an Assignment Architect, which is something I created from looking at people who are misaligned with their assignment.”

The institute offers several other stair-step certifications up to Master Assignment Architect. These certificates are ideal for anyone interested in operations.

Craig said Birmingham is ideal for his work because of the city’s high AI adoption rate, driven by younger residents and transplants.

“You have all of these companies coming from different parts of the U.S. and the world with fresh ideas,” he said. “A lot of people are receptive to it. Now that people see how much money AI can generate, it doesn’t take much to be successful if you have the right people behind you, and Birmingham has that community. They don’t gatekeep.”

To learn more about ProdigyIQ Technologies, visit prodigy-iq.io.