Best Practices: My Co-Founder is AI - A Playbook for the Modern Transit Agency

I couldn’t have started Kuban Transit Solutions (KTS) on my own five years ago. Being both the big-picture strategist and the day-to-day operator is exhausting and limits your capacity, but my digital co-founder has made the impossible possible: artificial intelligence (AI) is a force multiplier that makes it easier than ever to deliver excellence. The transit agencies that adopt it now will be the ones who come out of this administration further ahead. 

Today, AI helps me break inertia by totally eliminating mental context switching, enabling me to stay focused in the strategy or execution role I need at any given moment. This is the story of how I use AI at KTS, written as a playbook for you to follow at every organizational level of your transit agency. 

Establishing the strategy at the executive level  

To build KTS, I first had to create my north star: “Why does KTS exist?” Luckily for us, AI democratizes expertise in a way that has never existed before. I used it as my strategic consultant to help establish my differentiated business plan: it performed deep market analyses, sourced academic reports and synthesized them into strategy frameworks that have become the core of the KTS mission. 

Transit leaders face the same challenge in defining a clear direction amid tight funding, rising demand and stretched staff. Do what I did: Download every relevant industry report and ask AI to synthesize the proven solutions that match your city’s challenges. Feed it your strategic plans, ridership data and demographic data. Unlike a static consultant report, the process is iterative—you can push back, refine and challenge assumptions until you have a strategy that genuinely feels like yours.  

My toolkit: Perplexity researches, NotebookLM synthesizes, Gemini co-strategizes, WisprFlo transcribes voice 

Translating vision into action at the director level 

The harder part is turning vision into action. In writing this article, I knew my goal was to inspire and empower agency leaders, but it wasn’t immediately clear how to tell a meaningful story. I used AI as my strategic sparring partner by literally talking while I was out on a walk. We debated outlines and experimented with angles until the structure matched my vision before writing a word. 

Now imagine applying this to solving workforce development: You want to plan a driver recruitment campaign. You spar with an AI co-strategist to evaluate the best practices (e.g. job fairs vs. social media) while considering your specific community and goals. Together, you map out which channels are likely to yield the best results, rank them and draft timelines. In this way, you generate a powerful plan three times faster than you could before. When used effectively, AI gets you out of the swamp of indecision and into the river of action. 

My toolkit: WisprFlow for voice dictation, and all of Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. 

Amplifying your people at the execution level 

The real value in AI comes from amplifying your people’s strengths—not in replacing them. For example, I’m a better speaker and editor than I am a writer. Fr this article, I voice-dictated my raw ideas as streams of consciousness. AI acted as my junior writer, turning those messy transcripts into structured drafts, enabling me to be the editor refining the message to my vision.  

Now, flip this model based on your individual strengths. Consider a communications coordinator who writes beautiful, engaging content but struggles with brevity. They can draft content in their natural voice, then use AI as their editor while maintaining their unique voice. Every team member gets to focus on what they do best and use AI to fill out their skillsets. That means less time on personally energy-draining tasks (for me, those are emails), and more time spent leveling up work quality. The result is far more than efficiency—it's a feeling of empowerment. 

My toolkit: Gemini for writing, Superhuman for emails, Claude Code for development, CapCut for videos, Nano Banana for images 

The time is now 

You know that magical feeling of working with a true peer? Someone who gets you, challenges you and helps you grow—all without ego. That’s the relationship AI enables you to have with everyone. When we're all using these tools independently, we're all operating at a higher level. That shared baseline is AI's true power; it’s a force multiplier for the entire team. 

The challenges facing transit aren't getting easier: workforce shortages, aging infrastructure, evolving mobility patterns and tighter budgets. This new paradigm of tools is available right now to address them more effectively than ever. The only investment required is your time and willingness to experiment with new approaches. 

The playbook is yours. The time to start is now.