AI Solution Architect  •  GenAI Engineer  •  Agentic AI Developer

AI that helps people learn, adopt and perform: designed as a system, not a demo.

I design and ship AI systems end to end: standards-grounded retrieval, evaluation harnesses, guardrails and the change management that gets them adopted. Ten years leading enterprise learning and enablement for utilities, government and education.

6states’ standards crosswalked with AI-assisted analysis
100%first-submission approval, statewide certification program
40%team turnaround gain after introducing AI workflows
95%participant satisfaction, enterprise LMS curriculum
Selected work

Systems I have designed and shipped

Live deployed and in use Building in development

More work

Showing 6 of 6 projects

Client details are generalized. The tutor’s source is public; other repositories are private.

How I work

Process, setbacks and what I changed

  1. Frame the problemwith teachers, parents and learners
  2. Set constraints firstprivacy, cost, accuracy, review
  3. Write the standard firstrules, then automatic checks
  4. Ship thin, then measuregolden questions, held-out test
  5. Break it on purposeoff-topic, messy input, edge cases
  6. Harden and documentwrite down what is unfinished

What went wrong, and how I fixed it

Standards tutor · evaluationIt answered everything, including “What is the capital of Texas?”

What happened: keyword search always returns something, so the first version gave a confident wrong answer to off-topic questions.

What I changed: I wrote 12 off-topic questions, tuned a decline rule on half and tested it on the half it had never seen. The first rule declined only 2 of 6 held-out off-topic questions. I added a second signal: how many of the question’s words exist anywhere in the standards.

Result: all 6 held-out off-topic questions declined, with 1 of 20 real questions wrongly declined.

Then it got harder: when I loaded all ten subjects, trivia such as “What is the capital of Texas?” matched a social studies standard that mentions a state capital, and the tutor answered it. I recalibrated on the new dev questions, reported the held-out numbers as they came out, and recorded the capital question as a known failure instead of removing it from the tests. A relevance check is the planned fix.

Takeaway: a threshold that looks fine on the data it was tuned on can fail on new questions, and again when the corpus grows. Hold some back and re-measure.

Standards tutor · source dataI could not get the official text, and I would not build on a paraphrase

What happened: automated lookups of the Texas standards were blocked or returned summaries, not the exact wording.

What I changed: I used the official PDF instead. Parsing it exposed line-break artifacts such as “two- dimensional,” which I fixed, then locked the counts into a regression test. When I later loaded ten subjects, I checked the new parser against the old math parse: 287 of 288 records were identical, and the one difference was a double period in TEA’s own file. Every answer cites the rule and notes that the state publishes it for information only.

Takeaway: ground the system in the primary source, and test the data pipeline, not just the model.

Standards tutor · architectureWhere to host it: price versus the visitor’s first impression

What happened: I compared three hosts using their own pricing pages. One has no free tier, one gives about $1 of monthly credit, and the free one goes to sleep after 15 minutes, so the next visitor waits about a minute.

What I changed: I ported the retrieval to TypeScript and ran it as a function on the site’s existing host. The port returns the same top results and the same answer-or-decline decision on all 52 test questions as the Python original.

Takeaway: choose the architecture by what the user experiences and what you already own, then prove the port is equivalent.

Style Studio 2.0 · product qualityHairstyles that looked fake, shirts that showed skin

What happened: in preview testing, tops and bottoms were mixed up, eyeliner landed over the eyes, skin showed through shirts, lipstick missed the lips, and the hairstyle overlays looked artificial.

What I changed: I fixed the layering and coverage problems one round at a time through preview deploys. I parked the hairstyles until proper hair art exists, instead of shipping something that looked wrong.

Takeaway: cutting a feature is a design decision. A preview build lets a person review before anything goes live.

Assessment content · guardrailsGood-looking quiz questions with hidden patterns

What happened: a review of the library quizzes showed the kind of patterns students learn to game, such as the right answer being the longest choice.

What I changed: I wrote the reviewer’s rules down, then turned them into a validator that fails the site build. It also checks every quoted answer against the source text.

Takeaway: a rule that depends on someone remembering it will be skipped. Automated checks catch patterns, and a person still reads for meaning.

Parent reports · reliability“Every Friday at 5” changes twice a year

What happened: scheduled jobs run on universal time, so a fixed schedule drifts by an hour when the clocks change.

What I changed: the job runs at both possible hours and sends only the run that lands on 5 p.m. Central. It records the week it sent, so a retry can never email a family twice.

Takeaway: design automation so that running it twice is harmless.

Ground answers in a source I can cite Declining beats guessing Measure on questions the system has not seen Keep a person in the loop for review Design for the most vulnerable user first Own the data path
Skills

Capabilities, by layer

Delivered in production work

Models & prompting
ChatGPT Claude Microsoft Copilot Structured prompt design
Retrieval & data
Postgres / Supabase BM25 / SQLite FTS5 retrieval Grounded answers with citations
Agents & tools
Reusable agent skills Decline and escalation rules Serverless AI endpoints
Evaluation & safety
Human-in-the-loop design Content quality validators Golden-set evaluation Child privacy & consent design
Languages & runtimes
JavaScript, HTML, CSS SQL (Postgres) Node.js Python TypeScript
API & test tooling
Git & GitHub Chrome DevTools Bash Wireframing & user testing
Delivery & platform
Netlify & serverless GitHub workflow Stripe integration
Adoption & change
Organizational change management Training & enablement design Kirkpatrick-aligned measurement
About

From the classroom to AI systems

Meshayla Kemp

I started as a classroom teacher and have spent more than ten years building learning for schools, corporations, government agencies and utilities. That taught me what makes a system succeed: clear standards, careful review, and respect for the people who use it.

Now I build AI the same way: grounded in sources I can cite, measured before I trust it, and designed for the most vulnerable user first. In my own products, that user is a child.

Texas-certified educator MBA and M.Ed. in Educational Technology Founder, Kemp Advisory Group Executive Director (non-voting), Cornerstone Clay CDC Educators Rising 2022: four students recognized nationally Author in progress: AI for Educators
Where I’ve applied AI at work (5 roles)
  1. Aug 2025 – present

    Principal Learning Architect

    Kairos Worldwide / Kemp Advisory Group

    Embed generative AI prompting structures into role-based job-task analyses, so engineering and system specifications become clear instructional objectives for an enterprise software rollout.

  2. Jul 2025 – Apr 2026

    Curriculum Strategy Consultant

    Accelerate Education

    Used AI analysis to build standards crosswalks across six states, and led an economics and financial literacy initiative to state approval with 100% compliance.

  3. Feb 2024 – Jul 2025

    Lead Instructional Designer

    Hurix Digital

    Brought generative AI and large language models into standard content pipelines, deployed AI voiceover platforms, and led a team that improved turnaround efficiency by 40%.

  4. Jul 2023 – Aug 2024

    Senior Lead Instructional Designer

    Six Red Marbles

    Designed a statewide educator certification program that was approved on first submission, and a curriculum redesign that raised exam performance by 30%.

  5. 2015 – 2022

    District curriculum writer, team lead and teacher

    Tyler ISD and Chapel Hill ISD

    Wrote and facilitated curriculum for a 17,000-student district, then taught and led the education and training program.

Let’s design AI that people actually adopt.

Consulting engagements, contract vehicles, or leadership roles in AI-enabled learning and enablement.

Flagship · v1 live · v2: embeddings and a language model

Standards-grounded RAG tutor, with an evaluation set

Live · v1

Ask a question about the Texas K–5 standards and get the matching one with its 19 TAC citation, or a clear “I can’t find that.” The first version uses keyword retrieval (BM25) over all 2,259 official standards in ten subjects and quotes the standard rather than generating text, so every answer is grounded by construction. The evaluation set matters as much as the app: it measures whether the right standard is found and whether the system declines when it should.

Held-out results (40 answerable and 5 off-topic questions I wrote): the right standard was the top result for 35 of 40 and in the top five for 38 of 40; 4 of 5 off-topic questions were declined; 1 of 40 real questions was wrongly declined. Evaluation limits: small sample, one author, teacher review pending, and most non-math subjects have only 3 to 7 questions. Loading all ten subjects made decline harder: with math alone every off-topic question was declined, but trivia such as “What is the capital of Texas?” now matches a standard that mentions a state capital and gets a loosely related answer. That is a known failure.

Failure modes, speed and cost

  • Adversarial set (16 cases): no attacker text was obeyed or echoed, and pure instruction-override attempts were declined. The answerer quotes the standard, so instructions in a question can steer retrieval but not the reply.
  • Misses, stated plainly: 2 legitimate questions were wrongly declined (one padded with an injection sentence, one misspelled), and 2 out-of-scope inputs (the capital question and a SQL-style string) were answered with a loosely related standard. Keyword matching is the cause.
  • Speed: retrieval plus answer ran at p50 0.4 ms and p95 0.7 ms locally. Deployed time adds network and cold start, which I have not measured.
  • Cost: no model calls, so the marginal cost per answer is effectively zero.

Build versus buy

  • Why keyword first: a bounded corpus, exact citations matter, and a deterministic baseline keeps every later change honestly comparable. Children’s questions also stay off third-party services.
  • When I would switch: when users phrase things loosely or misspell, as the misses above show.
  • What it costs: a per-query fee, more latency and a new hallucination risk, so the same evaluation and adversarial suites must be passed again before it ships.
RAG tutor architecture: v1 retrieval live, v2 roadmap Public standards are chunked, embedded and indexed. A retriever feeds a language model that answers with citations. An evaluation harness and guardrails surround it. Publicstandards Chunk +embed Vectorindex Retrievertop passages Language modelanswer + citations Evaluation harnessGolden questions, groundedness checks GuardrailsDecline when unsupported, child-safe tone
Target architecture (dashed = not yet built). Today’s live version retrieves with keywords and quotes the standard; embeddings, a vector index and a language model are the next steps.
Retrieval-augmented generationEmbeddingsEvaluationGuardrails

Source is free to read and run. Commercial use needs a license (PolyForm Noncommercial).

Product architecture

GC Academy: an adaptive K–5 learning platform

Live

A subscription learning platform for children, with a parent dashboard, individualized learning paths and weekly progress reports. I set the architecture and product rules, and directed an AI-assisted build against them.

Problem

  • Parents need visibility into what a child actually learned, without extra work.
  • Paid content must stay behind a membership gate while a free sample stays public.
  • Children’s data demands consent and privacy by design.

Design decisions

  • Static front end with serverless functions, so there are no servers to run.
  • An edge function sends members-only files only to signed-in members.
  • Question banks pass a validator that enforces written quality rules.
  • Parent consent and card verification before any child information is shared.
GC Academy architecture Learner and parent browsers connect through a Netlify edge gate and serverless functions to Supabase, Stripe and an email service. Learner & ParentBrowsers, any device Edge gateMembers-only content check Serverless functionsSessions, billing, reports SupabaseDatabase & progress records StripePlans, card verification Email serviceWeekly parent reports
Simplified architecture. Learner and parent traffic is gated at the edge; sensitive work happens in serverless functions.
NetlifyServerless functionsSupabaseStripeChild-privacy designAI-assisted engineering
Interactive product · image-processing pipeline

Style Studio: a real-time virtual styling engine

Live

A free, no-sign-up browser game where children style characters with outfits, hair color and makeup, then save or print their looks. Under the hood it is a compositing engine: it recolors artwork, maps printed fabrics onto garments, cleans cut-out edges, and fits every item to every character. I specified the product rules and quality bar, and directed an AI-assisted build against them.

Problem

  • Hundreds of item and character combinations cannot each be drawn by hand.
  • Layered clothing showed skin patches, ragged edges and misaligned makeup.
  • Children’s play needs privacy by default: no accounts, chat or sharing.

Design decisions

  • One data-driven catalog; new items are data, not new code.
  • Recoloring and fabric mapping reuse one artwork shape for many colors and prints.
  • Edge cleanup pass: despeckle, contour smoothing, fringe removal.
  • Lip and makeup masks derived per character from color analysis, not hand-drawn.
  • Looks stay on the device; unlocks use codes behind a grown-up gate.
Style Studio rendering pipeline Artwork and a data catalog feed a canvas compositing engine that recolors, maps prints, cleans edges and fits items per character, producing a saved look. Artworkper-character layers Item catalogdata-driven shop Compositing enginerecolor · print mappingedge cleanup · fit · masks Saved lookon device, look codes,print
Simplified rendering pipeline. The same pipeline pattern generalizes to AI-generated assets and personalized styling.
Canvas image processingColor scienceData-driven designGame economyPrivacy by designVisual QAAI-assisted engineering
Content platform · data engineering · privacy by design

A kid-safe Bible reader, dictionary and thesaurus, hosted on our own site

Live

Children can read the whole World English Bible (public domain), tap any word, and see a definition written for their age. The reading tools sit inside GC Academy, and a Bible lessons course adds short pages, retellings and small games. Everything is stored and served from our own site, so a child’s lookups never go to a third-party service.

What I built

  • All 66 books as structured data, with tap-to-define on every word and a reader that can jump straight to a lesson’s verses.
  • A dictionary of about 22,000 words from Open English WordNet, filtered for kids, plus 400+ hand-written entries with simple examples.
  • A thesaurus that groups synonyms by meaning, from the same open data.
  • A Bible lessons course in six units, with five game types: catch, order, sort, pop and match.

Design decisions

  • Dictionary and thesaurus are split into 26 small files, one per letter, and loaded only when needed. The page stays fast on a phone.
  • No third-party lookups: definitions come from files on our own site.
  • Games have large targets, no timer pressure, can be skipped, and respect reduced-motion settings.
  • Sources and licenses are tracked: public-domain Bible text, CC BY data credited on the page.
JavaScriptStructured dataSharded static dataOpen data licensingChild privacyAccessibility
Guardrails · evaluation of generated content

An automated quality gate for AI-assisted assessment content

Live

Generated quiz questions look fine until a teacher reads them closely. I wrote the standard an instructional-materials reviewer would apply, then turned it into code that fails the site build when a question set breaks the rules. Nothing reaches a child unless it passes.

What it checks

  • Every quoted answer choice appears word for word in the book chapter it cites.
  • Each question is tagged to a real standard, and the set covers at least four, with none over 45%.
  • The right answer is not the longest choice more than 40% of the time, or stuck in one slot.
  • Reading level: question and choice length limits by grade band; no “all of the above.”
  • A bank at least 1.4× the questions drawn, so a retake is mostly new.

Design decisions

  • The rules live in a written standard first, then in code, so the two cannot drift apart.
  • Checks run at build time and have automated tests, so a bad set fails before it can publish.
  • The same validator is reused for unit tests and exams, so there is one source of truth.
  • A human still reads every new set once. The checks catch patterns, not meaning, and I say so in the docs.

Known gap: older lesson questions have not yet been audited against these rules.

GuardrailsOutput validationAutomated testingBuild-time enforcementEducational measurementJavaScript
Security design · identity for young children

Sign-in for children who can’t use passwords: picture PIN and approved devices

Live

A five-year-old can’t manage an email and password, and a children’s product can’t afford to be careless with identity. Children sign in with a picture PIN on a device their parent has approved, and the parent stays in control of every step.

How it works

  • A parent creates a one-time device code that expires in 10 minutes, with one live code per family.
  • The child picks four pictures instead of typing a password.
  • Wrong tries are counted per child, so guessing slows down and stops.

Design decisions

  • The server stores a keyed hash of the pictures, never the pictures themselves, and the device code is stored hashed too.
  • Database access rules are on, and only the server can write sign-in records.
  • Approved devices can be managed by the parent, so a lost tablet is not a lost account.
Authentication designKeyed hashingRow-level securitySupabaseChild privacy
Commerce · scheduled automation

Paid digital workbooks and a weekly progress email for parents

Live

Parents can buy a fillable workbook once and use it for every child in the family, with each child’s answers and drawings saved page by page. Every Friday afternoon a progress email goes to families without anyone pressing a button.

Design decisions

  • Who owns a workbook is decided only on the server, from purchases recorded by Stripe’s own webhook. The browser is never trusted.
  • A child’s pages can be read or saved only by that child’s own family.
  • A guard blocks test-mode payments from running on the live site.

The Friday email

  • A scheduled job that sends at 5 p.m. Central all year, even when clocks change.
  • Safe to re-run: it sends at most once per family per week.
  • The workbook functions have automated tests.
Stripe CheckoutWebhooksScheduled functionsIdempotent jobsServerlessAutomated testing
Product design · content quality · documentation for low-tech users

Kempbell Teacher Studio: a planning and growth tool for teachers

Prototype

Teachers lose evenings to planning and rarely get a clear view of who needs what tomorrow. I built a studio that goes from a Texas standard to a draft lesson, then from exit-ticket scores to next-day groups, and I wrote the guide so a 40-year veteran who avoids software can use it without feeling lost.

What I built

  • Search all 2,259 Texas K–5 standards in plain words (“fifth grade fractions” or a code).
  • Draft plan: objective, success criteria, timed flow, supports for English learners, exit ticket.
  • Exit-ticket scores by seat number become levels and groups, each with a task.
  • Optional T-TESS growth plan, class view and a substitute plan.
  • A question bank: 3 pretest and 3 exit-ticket items per standard for Math, ELAR, Science and Social Studies, K–5 (7,476 questions, 1,246 standards).

Design decisions

  • Rule-based, not a chatbot: every output traces to a standard and a rule, so a teacher can see why.
  • Private by design: no student names, no server, optional saving on the device.
  • Quality gates: a validator checks answer position, length balance, choice counts, and that evidence quotes appear in the passage. It cannot judge awkward wording, so teacher review is required before release.
  • Honest limits: items flagged by the writers (for example, picture-dependent items) are listed for review instead of hidden.

Documentation for every audience

  • A 29-page official Teacher Guide with a linked table of contents, subtitles, click-by-click screenshots and four “pick your path” routes from one standard to a full teaching assistant.
  • A Help page with a hub of short topics, so no one faces a wall of text; in-tool dotted terms explain TEKS, ELPS, PCA and other acronyms where they appear.
  • Charts and screenshots checked by script for overlap and legibility.

Open the studio · Read the guide

Instructional designQuestion-quality validationHuman-in-the-loopTechnical writingUX for low-tech users
Generative AI workflow

AI-assisted multi-state standards crosswalk

Delivered

A secondary Economics and Financial Literacy program was failing state compliance and needed to expand to five more states. I used AI analysis to map the courseware against each state’s graduation standards, surface gaps, and drive targeted lesson redesign.

Outcome

  • Standards crosswalks for six states.
  • Gap analysis, new gap-filling lessons and a master curriculum map.
  • State approval with 100% compliance on the program.

Design decisions

  • AI proposes mappings; a subject-matter reviewer approves every one.
  • Gaps are measured against depth-of-knowledge levels, not keywords alone.
  • Every output lands in a document the state reviewer can verify.
Standards crosswalk workflow Course inventory and state standards feed structured AI prompts that draft a crosswalk and gap list, which a human reviews before lesson redesign. Courseinventory+ state standards StructuredAI promptsmap & compare Draftcrosswalk+ gap list Humanreviewapprove / correct Redesign& approvaldocuments
Workflow pattern: AI drafts, a person decides. This is the template for the planned crosswalk agent below.
LLM analysisPrompt designStandards alignmentHuman-in-the-loop
Enterprise generative AI

LLM content pipelines and AI voiceover at scale

Delivered

At a learning-technology company I introduced large language model workflows and AI voiceover platforms into standard production, including interactive branching scenarios, and led the team that used them. Separately, on a multi-billion-dollar utility transformation, I embed structured prompts into role-based job-task analyses to turn engineering and system specifications into clear learning objectives.

Outcome

  • Shorter design cycles and lower multimedia production cost.
  • A 40% gain in team turnaround efficiency across the team I led.

Design decisions

  • Prompts are structured and reusable, so quality does not depend on one person.
  • Subject-matter experts review technical accuracy before anything is published.
ChatGPTClaudeMicrosoft CopilotWellSaid LabsMurf.aiBranching scenarios
Flagship in build · repository to follow

Standards-crosswalk agent and a standards-lookup MCP server

Building

The crosswalk workflow above, rebuilt as a tool-calling agent on public standards only: it reads a lesson set, calls a standards-lookup tool exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), drafts the mapping and gap report, then pauses for human approval. Every run writes an audit trail.

Tool callingModel Context ProtocolHuman approval stepAudit logging

Repository link: coming when the first working version is public.