Building a New Frontier

CitizenWorks founder Jamie Christensen joins Doug Erwin to share how she went from automating her own corporate job to building a thriving Reno AI services business. They explore human-first AI adoption, citizen developers, coding agents, job fears, entrepreneurship, and why the final pass on meaningful work should always be human.

## Show notes

Jamie Christensen is the founder of CitizenWorks, a Reno-based company that helps organizations use AI and automation through workforce training and custom systems.

Before launching the company, Jamie spent nearly a decade in healthcare operations. She taught herself no-code tools, automated much of her own role, and built a citizen developer program that empowered non-technical employees in HR, payroll, accounting, and recruiting to improve their own work.

Jamie launched CitizenWorks after maternity leave while raising newborn twins and a two-year-old. She and Doug talk candidly about the financial pressure of that first year, the value of total commitment, and the role Reno Startup Week and Northern Nevada’s entrepreneurial community played in accelerating the business.

The conversation then turns to practical AI adoption. Jamie argues that most organizations are not truly behind; most are simply at the beginning. Her advice is to establish basic AI fluency, give employees safe tools and room to experiment, and let people closest to the work identify the best opportunities. Those internal citizen developers often become the people who create the most useful systems.

Doug and Jamie also discuss:

– Why AI is lowering the barrier to entrepreneurship

– How domain expertise and strong relationships become more valuable as building gets easier

– Why companies should treat AI as a growth multiplier, not merely a headcount-reduction tool

– Jevons paradox and the likelihood that cheaper intelligence creates more work and more possibilities

– How coding agents let non-technical people orchestrate work across multiple systems

– The difference between using AI to do less and using it to offer customers more

– Bottom-up experimentation versus top-down mandates

– Data security, open models, and owning the harness around your AI systems

– Why model choice matters less than finding valuable use cases

– The danger of mistaking AI-generated output for truly original thinking

– Why every consequential message deserves a human final pass

– The importance of founder community through Kiln, EO Reno Tahoe, and Reno Startup Week