ABOUT — DAVE AUTON
Eighteen years in IT. AI is the newest version of that job.
I’m Dave Auton, an AI training and governance consultant working with a small, curated roster of organizations. I help leaders and teams adopt Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini safely, so the tools actually get used rather than just switched on.
Before AI, it was servers, then Microsoft 365, Azure and security. The technology keeps changing. The job of translating it into something a business can use safely hasn’t.
Dave Auton · High River, Alberta
- 18 years in IT
- Over 100 client organizations advised
- Published author
HOW I GOT HERE
Most of my career has been the same job, wearing different technology.
Sitting across from a business owner or a leadership team, understanding what they actually need, and building the plan to get them there safely. Servers, Microsoft 365, Azure, security — and now AI, which in some ways is the most consequential version of that job, because the decisions get made faster and the mistakes are harder to undo.
Enterprise support & large-scale migrations
Six years cutting my teeth on enterprise-scale problems: Tier 3 escalation for complex messaging and directory systems, disaster-recovery planning, and a string of large migration projects — including leading a team of contractors through a multi-office desktop migration for a major utility. The foundation everything after was built on.
Twelve years in technology advisory & consulting
Same core relationship, held for over a decade: managing infrastructure across 900+ monitored endpoints, running business reviews and roadmaps for over 100 client organizations, and building AI governance guidance from the ground up. The titles changed; the work stayed the same conversation, deepening over time.
Affinity Digital Design
A focused, capacity-limited practice: AI training and governance for a small number of organizations at a time, built on everything above.
WHY I START WITH DATA AND PERMISSIONS
“Once company data has gone into a tool nobody vetted, you can’t really undo that.”
Working in managed services, I watched AI arrive in client environments before anyone had decided whether it should. People signed up for free tools, pasted in what they were working on, and moved on. Locking that down afterwards was far harder than getting it right at the start.
So my training starts where your data already lives. For organizations on Microsoft 365, that often means Copilot, because it works inside the permissions you already have. For others, it’s ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, set up properly for business use.
I use more than one of these tools myself every week. None of them is the right answer for everyone, and I don’t resell any of them.
WHAT WORKING TOGETHER LOOKS LIKE
Training and governance, built around how your team actually works
When I run a training session, it isn’t a generic slide deck adapted to whoever’s in the room. I’ve built and delivered a five-part Microsoft Copilot enablement program from the ground up, and every version of it starts the same way: understanding what a team already does, then building the session around that — not the other way around.
Governance work follows the same instinct. I’ve run AI readiness assessments and written usage policy for organizations that had no real idea where the line was between “helpful” and “risky” until we mapped it out together. That’s also why I wrote AI Governance for Small Business. The field manual exists because I kept having the same conversation with different clients, and it seemed worth putting in writing.
None of this is theoretical. It’s been tested in front of groups of twenty to forty people, more than a dozen times, inside real organizations with real deadlines — which is a different thing entirely from a deck built to impress in a sales meeting.
WHY AFFINITY DIGITAL DESIGN, NOW
A deliberate choice, not a limitation
Affinity Digital Design is a focused practice for AI training and governance, limited to 10–15 organizations at a time. The limit is deliberate. It only works if I know each client’s environment, people and priorities well.
After years of seeing AI adopted badly, quickly and without a plan, I wanted to build the practice I’d have wanted those clients to have: small, prepared and accountable.
Talk to Dave Auton directly
Curious whether this is the right fit?
The free consult is a no-commitment conversation about where your team is with AI, and whether training, governance or a one-time project makes sense.