About the Author

Neil D. Morris is a fractional technology executive and author with more than twenty-five years of experience leading enterprise transformation, cybersecurity governance, and AI strategy across multiple industries. He has managed technology teams exceeding two hundred people, overseen budgets north of fifty million dollars, and driven operational savings in the tens of millions—the kind of work that happens behind the scenes of every system people take for granted.

A three-time ORBIE nominee and the author of Why AI Fails: The Leadership Discipline Behind the 5% Who Succeed, Morris has spent his career at the intersection of emerging technology and organizational risk. He writes and speaks extensively on why ninety-five percent of AI initiatives fail to deliver value—and what the five percent who succeed do differently.

His framework, the Seven Pillars of AI Leadership, has been adopted by executives working to close the gap between AI ambition and AI governance. He is a member of IEEE, ISSA, OWASP, and the Society for Information Management, and has served on advisory boards for technology associations and nonprofit foundations.

Zero Threshold and The Sentinel Protocols series draw on what Morris knows firsthand: that the most dangerous failures in AI aren't technical—they're failures of leadership, foresight, and the courage to say not yet. The threats in these pages are fiction. The vulnerabilities are not.

The same mind is behind both shelves. Neil D. Morris spent 25 years leading enterprise technology and governing AI in regulated, mission-critical environments—the work he distilled into the nonfiction book Why AI Fails. The Sentinel Protocols is the other side of that ledger: the thrillers about what happens when no one does that work. The book argues AI fails for leadership reasons. The series dramatizes the cost when leadership looks away.

Neil D. Morris lives in Greater Denver, Colorado.