James Blair: Part 2 — Solutions engineering, critical thinking, and staying human

This episode is Part 2 of our conversation with James Blair. He explains how he found his “accidental perfect fit” as a solutions engineer and how that role became a pipeline into product management. Get a peek into the AI-powered tooling he’s now building for the Posit ecosystem, and hear how he’s using Claude Code, Positron Assistant, and DataBot to generate synthetic, industry-specific demos on the fly — plus, why the real magic is keeping humans firmly in the loop. 

Episode notes

This is a story about listening deeply to users and using AI to make that listening scale. James explains what solutions engineers actually do, how that work shaped Posit’s product team, and how synthetic data plus agents are changing the way they build demos and teach data science. 

What’s inside

• What a solutions engineer really is and why the role was such a good fit for James
• How solutions engineering became a natural pathway into product management at Posit
• Multi-agent “bot posse” workflows and why context management matters
• Using AI the right way and why code literacy, critical thinking, and staying human are the real superpowers in an AI-saturated world