About

About Jon Sheridan

Jon Sheridan is a pen name. I use it because Kindred Intelligence is about ideas, not personal branding, and because the day job and the other commitments in my life deserve a bit of separation from a blog about AI tools. If you have found your way here, you are interested in what I think about this technology, not what I had for breakfast.

That said, some context helps. So here is who I am, roughly.

What I do for a living

I am a Head of IT at a company with multiple business units. The role is broader than the title suggests. I build custom software solutions across PHP, Python, C#, and JavaScript. I manage cloud infrastructure on AWS. I look after network security, audio-visual systems for research viewing facilities, and compliance standards including ISO and Cyber Essentials. I sit on the senior leadership team, which means I spend as much time thinking about business process and strategy as I do about code.

The company is not a tech firm. It is a people-facing business that depends on technology working reliably and intelligently. That shapes how I think about AI. I am not building it from scratch in a research lab. I am working out how to apply it usefully in a real organisation with real constraints, legacy systems, tight budgets, and colleagues who need things to work on a Tuesday morning without a PhD in prompt engineering.

Most of the AI writing I see comes from one of two places: the Silicon Valley perspective, where everything is a revolution, or the academic perspective, where everything is a paper. I am writing from neither. I am writing from the perspective of someone who builds and maintains business systems for a living and is trying to integrate AI into that work honestly and practically.

What I do outside of work

I am an elected local councillor. I represent a ward in the north of England, which means I spend a fair amount of time on housing, road safety, planning, community cohesion, and the kind of unglamorous local government work that actually affects how people live. I care about social justice, democratic accountability, and making sure the people who are least heard get a voice.

This matters for how I write about technology. I am not neutral about who benefits from AI and who gets left behind. I think about accessibility, about cost, about power, about who owns the data and who profits from the labour. That lens is present in what I write here, sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a quiet current underneath.

I am also a distance runner. I train around 50 kilometres a week, which gives me a lot of time to think and very little patience for waffle. Both of those qualities, I hope, show up in the writing.

Why Kindred Intelligence exists

I started this site because I could not find the thing I wanted to read.

I wanted writing about AI tools that was practical rather than breathless. Honest about limitations. Grounded in actual use rather than press releases. Written by someone who builds things for a living rather than someone who reviews things for a living. Written with an awareness that technology is not neutral and that the choices we make about which tools we adopt, and how, have consequences beyond efficiency.

Kindred Intelligence is the site I wish existed when I started working with AI in my day-to-day work. Reviews are based on real use, not a 15-minute trial. Posts are about what I have learned, not what I have been told. Guides are written for people who need to get something done, not people studying for an exam.

The name reflects what I think the best human-AI relationship looks like: a kind of collaborative intelligence, where both parties bring something the other lacks. Not artificial intelligence replacing human judgment. Not human stubbornness ignoring useful tools. Something more like a partnership between minds that think differently.

What I value

Open source over closed source. Where a good open-source option exists, I will favour it. Not dogmatically, but consistently. The concentration of AI capability in a handful of well-funded companies is worth questioning, and tools that give users control over their own data and processes deserve attention.

Honesty over hype. If a tool is not ready, I will say so. If the answer is "it depends on your situation", I will say that too. I have no affiliations with any AI company and nothing to sell you.

Equity over equality. Not everyone starts from the same place. AI tools that only work for the technically privileged, or that are priced out of reach for smaller organisations, deserve scrutiny alongside their feature sets.

Practical over theoretical. I am interested in what works in practice, for real people, in real organisations, on a Tuesday morning.

Get in touch

If you want to talk about anything on this site, suggest a tool for review, or disagree with something I have written, I am happy to hear from you. The best way to reach me is through the contact page.

I read everything. I do not always reply quickly, because the day job and the ward work come first. But I read everything.