She built AI agent runtime control in 2022.
Alone. Between surgeries. Three years before the industry named the problem.
This is not a story about technology. It is the most compelling AI governance real world example I have encountered in 27 years of working inside organizations navigating disruption. And it is a story about what human beings build when they have no other choice — and what that building reveals about the capabilities no AI can replicate.
Emily Hartstone gave me permission to tell it. So I am telling all of it.
AI Governance Real World Example: In 2021, Emily Was Fighting for Her Life
She had been misdiagnosed for years. Florida doctors had it wrong, repeatedly, consequentially wrong. She finally flew herself to the Mayo Clinic, where they got it right. The diagnosis: leukemia. A battle she would not be able to win outright, but one she refused to lose on anyone else’s terms.
The surgeries started. Then more surgeries. Her insurance began denying everything. She spent nearly $300,000 out of pocket. More procedures were coming, and she could no longer work at the pace her organizations required. She needed to hire staff she could not afford. She was running out of options and running out of time.
So she did what people who have no other choice sometimes do.
She figured it out.
Emily started experimenting with AI agents — not because she read an article about them, not because a consultant recommended them, not because her industry told her it was time. She built AI workflows in 2022 because her survival — financial, professional, and in some ways physical — depended on it. She needed to run multiple organizations essentially by herself while recovering from surgery. The agents made that possible.
And then the agents started sending emails to people they shouldn’t.
Most people would have shut it down. Emily thought: I built the agent. Now I need to control it. So she built the runtime control system too.
She even chased herself down debugging before she realized it was her own security system kicking her out. She had to remind herself: she was not a developer. She was a survivor building what survival required.
Three Years Before the Industry Named the Problem
By 2025, Emily was watching the news coverage of the so-called “AI crisis” — the breathless reporting about autonomous agents behaving unpredictably, the industry scrambling to build guardrails and governance frameworks — and she laughed.
“Wait,” she said. “I built this in 2022.”
She had. Out of necessity. Out of survival. Three years before the industry named the problem, Emily had already solved it — not with a team of engineers or a venture-backed budget, but alone, in pain, between surgeries, running on determination and the Silva Method she practices every day to turn pain into energy.
The AI governance crisis of 2025 was, for Emily Hartstone, a Tuesday.
But She Did Not Stop at Solving Her Own Problem
From the first day she started writing what she calls “the larger code,” she understood the stakes. She knew there was a chance her runtime authority control architecture could get into the hands of someone it should not reach. She still fears that. It keeps her up at night.
But what keeps her going is what she sees on the other side of that fear.
When Emily thinks about runtime authority control — the system she built alone, between surgeries, without a team or a budget — she does not see it only inside corporate infrastructure. She sees it stopping AI from autonomously deploying weapons in military environments. She sees it applied to combating drug trafficking and human trafficking. She sees it correcting the racist bias embedded in facial recognition technology — a bug in the code, she says, that has cost real people real freedom.
That is her endgame. Not a product. Not a platform. Keeping the human in humanity.
She did not set out to build governance infrastructure for the AI age. She set out to survive. And in surviving, she built the thing the world is now desperately trying to invent.
Emily Is Not a Cautionary Tale. She Is the Proof.
The proof that the people who build real capability do not wait for permission, for the perfect moment, or for the technology to be packaged and explained and made easy. They build when they have to. And when they build under those conditions, with those stakes, what they create is something no one can take from them.
The AI boom did not create Emily’s story.
Emily created it.
What Emily Built — Through the Lens of the Kryptonite Defense
In my book Distinct or Extinct, I describe five capabilities — what I call the Kryptonite Defense — that protect professionals and organizations against the forces reshaping the world of work. When I look at what Emily built, I see all five ingredients operating simultaneously. Not one at a time. All at once.
IDEAS. She saw a second-order solution no one around her was considering. When the system broke down, she did not accept the problem as the final answer — she reframed it as a design challenge and built something new. When that something new started behaving unpredictably, she did not shut it down. She designed the governance layer the entire industry is now trying to replicate.
SPEED. She did not wait for the technology to mature, for the industry to catch up, or for someone to hand her a roadmap. She moved when moving was the only option, and she moved faster than organizations with far more resources. Three years faster, as it turned out.
TALENT. She brought something no AI agent could supply — the judgment to know when it was working, the wisdom to know when it wasn’t, and the irreplaceable human instinct to say, I built it, now I control it. And beneath the technical work, the deepest talent of all: the moral clarity to ask what this technology should — and should not — be allowed to do.
DISTINCTION. In a room full of people waiting for AI to be explained to them, Emily had already built it, broken it, fixed it, and scaled it. Then she extended it toward applications the AI governance industry has barely begun to imagine. That is not a resume line. That is a fingerprint no model can replicate.
LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS. She did not lead from a title, a budget, or a position of strength. She led from accountability — to her organizations, to the people counting on her, and to herself. And now she leads from a conviction that extends far beyond her own survival: that the humans who build AI must be the ones who govern it, before the ones who shouldn’t get there first.
That is the Kryptonite Defense.
Not as a framework. As a life.
Why This AI Governance Real World Example Matters Right Now
The AI governance debate happening in boardrooms, in Congress, and in the pages of every major publication is being treated as a new problem requiring new solutions. New frameworks. New regulations. New experts.
Emily Hartstone solved it in 2022. In her living room. Between surgeries.
I tell her story in The Pincer Files — a forthcoming collection of real-world proof that the Kryptonite Defense is not a theory. It is what real people have already built, often under pressure, often without permission, often before the world understood what they were doing.
I also carry Emily’s story into the research I am conducting for my next book, Raise Them Distinct — a book for parents about preparing children for a world that will not stop changing. Because the question Emily’s story raises is not only about AI governance. It is about what we are raising the next generation to become. The capability Emily demonstrated — to see what others cannot see, to build when others wait, to govern what others fear — is not something a credential produces. It is something a life builds.
That is exactly what Raise Them Distinct is about.
Your Story
Emily’s story reached me because she reached out. She had been doing extraordinary work, largely alone, for years — and the loneliness of building something the world has not yet named is real.
If you have a story like Emily’s — if you have built something under pressure, ahead of your time, without the team or the budget or the permission the situation seemed to require — I want to hear it.
Not to extract value from it. To honor it. And to make sure the people who need to see it, see it.
Reach out at mike@realmikeevans.com. Tell me what you built.
Those prepared need not fear the forces at work.
Distinct or Extinct is available now on Amazon. Download Chapter 1 free at realmikeevans.com
Take the Kryptonite Scorecard at realmikeevans.com/scorecard — where do you stand on the five capabilities that make humans irreplaceable?
The Pincer Files and Raise Them Distinct are forthcoming. If you have a story that belongs in either book, write to mike@realmikeevans.com.