I’ve been shipping software since 1999.
I’m Daniel Willems. Lanier is the studio I run — a small shop that designs, builds, and operates production AI systems. Twenty-five years of senior engineering, the last five building with AI every day. Almost everything on this site is running in production right now, and most of it I still ship to.
The work, in one breath
I started writing software in 1999 — twenty-five years of building things. Early on at Turner Broadcasting, making internal tools for their teams. Then a long stretch running engineering for a digital agency, shipping platforms for healthcare, fundraising, and consumer companies. Along the way, senior engineer or tech lead at a handful of startups — each one is a case study on this site.
What I do now is narrower and deeper: I run a studio that takes one or two new engagements a year and ships the actual system a company runs on. Not a chat widget bolted onto someone else’s CRM — the platform itself. Some of that work is for clients. A growing share of it is our own products: a language-learning app (PollyStop), a children’s education platform (Train Your Brain), a marketing OS that runs on scheduled agents (Daily Neon). All in market, all running today.
The flagship engagement
The longest thread is my work since 2014 with what used to be called AIANTA — the American Indian Alaska Native Tourism Association, now AIT (American Indigenous Tourism) after their 2025 name change. For over a decade I’ve operated both the public platform, destinationnativeamerica.com, and the internal hub that runs their membership, grants, and events — plus the AI-curated brief their leadership reads every Monday morning. It’s the deepest case study on the site and a good picture of what a long fractional-CTO engagement actually looks like. The full story is here.
We use the things we sell
The studio runs on its own agents. A small fleet — Pax, Mebo, and Clyde — handles real production work against our own platforms: scheduled jobs, content pipelines, outreach, the weekly briefs. They claim work race-safely, run skills, and report back. It’s the same shape of system I build for clients, pointed at our own operation. Almost no consultant can credibly say that in 2026 — so when I tell you a system can run unattended and report for itself, it isn’t a slide. It’s how my own shop works. There are short writeups in the lab.
The easiest first step is a short call.
Fifteen minutes will tell us both if there’s something here — whether you’ve got a system eating your team’s time or a product idea you can’t get into market.