Danny Castro doesn't spend a lot of time trying to convince people that AI matters. His position is simpler: look around. It's already here. The question is whether you're fluent in it or just pretending to be.
That distinction between literacy and fluency is something he comes back to often. "Literacy means you can recognize some words," he told me. "Fluency means you can actually use the language." He speaks Spanish. He knows the difference. And it's the reason he co-founded the Raleigh chapter of AI Tinkerers with Paula Ramos PhD, the reason he keeps showing up at events across the Triangle, and the reason he's built a career at the intersection of AI implementation and community building across companies like IBM, Cisco, ServiceNow, and Netomi.
Danny is also one of the ecosystem catalysts for All Things AI, which means he's not just attending the conference in March. He's part of the connective tissue that makes it worth attending.
His practitioner background matters here. He's led cross-functional technical teams, managed enterprise customer success portfolios, and spent hands-on time architecting conversational AI systems, handling prompt engineering, security protocols, and performance analytics. When he talks about what's actually being built with AI in the Triangle versus what people say they're building, he's not speaking theoretically.
What he wants more people to pay attention to is governance. Not the policy-paper version. The practical, real-consequence version.
Right now, anyone can build an AI application. The tools are accessible. The friction is low. What gets skipped is the harder question: what is the model actually doing with that data? Who's accountable when the output is wrong? What happens downstream to the people in that system?
Danny is working through this right now as the volunteer Director of Technology for the Institute of Contextual Health, a healthcare nonprofit in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They're building a healthcare app with AI components, and he's responsible for making sure the governance layer actually exists. Not as a document filed somewhere. As something reviewed quarterly, updated actively, and available to answer the question anyone might ask: what is the AI doing, and why?
"There's no black hole," he said. "If anyone asks, we can tell them."
He also worries about what happens to access as AI pricing climbs. He uses an analogy from his early career in tech: in the early 2000s, some parts of Michigan had broadband while others were stuck on 56K dial-up. The infrastructure gap wasn't just inconvenient — it determined what you could build. He sees AI heading down the same road. Developers paying out of pocket for cloud computing. College students priced out. Communities in Latin America with real technical talent but shrinking ability to compete.
The Triangle's answer to this, in Danny's view, is the community itself. Events like AI Tinkerers give developers a place to show their work and get real feedback. No one is coding in isolation. No one is reinventing a wheel someone else has already built. And when a graduate student from NC State's master's program was sitting in the audience while a presenter cited his research paper — not knowing he was in the room — that was the whole point made visible. Aum's work was being used. He got to watch it happen.
That's what's being built here. And All Things AI is where more of it gets seen.
Danny is actively looking for his next role in AI program management or customer success, and if you're building something in this space, he's exactly the kind of person worth a conversation.