A community for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and working professionals learning to use AI skillfully. Right now, it's the weekly Field Notes — taught by a practitioner using these tools every day, not a promoter, not a platform. The YouTube channel and the community open soon.
The 28-page primer is free. Delivered with the weekly Field Notes — one useful idea a week.
"I watched a co-worker — someone smart, capable, experienced — using AI wrong. Confidently wrong. And they had no idea.
That moment is the whole reason Mountain Labs exists."
You don't need a computer science degree, a startup budget, or a year of free time to use AI skillfully in your work. You need the foundation most courses skip — taught in plain language by a practitioner who uses these tools every day to run an actual business.
From confused to capable, in weeks.
Not months.
The biggest barrier isn't ability. It's finding someone credible enough to trust who will tell you the truth about what AI can and can't do.
Before you waste months learning the hard way.
Available right now: a free weekly email that teaches the fundamentals. Our YouTube channel and community are coming next. Get on the list, and you'll be the first to know when each one opens.
A 28-page primer plus a weekly email. Learn the foundations most courses skip or gloss over, taught the way a trusted colleague would explain it to you over coffee.
This is for the person who knows they need to learn AI - someone who is fed up with the YouTube hype and bottomless Reddit threads, and doesn't know where else to start.
Short videos from the field: building agentic systems, AI-built SaaS, a small business run with AI. Be the first to know when it launches.
Weekly live Q&A with Chris, monthly workshops, a growing Classroom of courses, and a peer group doing the same work. Waitlist gets invited first.
The Classroom starts with The Foundation — a seven-module course built like an Everest expedition. New courses are added as the community grows: agentic workflows, prompt systems, AI-built SaaS, and the specific applications members ask for. Members get every course, every update, every new route — included.
What AI actually is, how it works at a level that matters for users, and how to think about it as a tool — not a magic box, not a threat.
The honest version. Where AI is genuinely powerful. Where it fails. What it will never do. The module most courses skip.
How to evaluate and choose AI tools for your specific work — not based on hype or marketing, but on fit and capability.
How to write prompts that get useful results across marketing, customer communication, analysis, and copywriting. Practical, specific, tested.
The most important skill in working with AI — how to catch errors, verify outputs, and maintain the quality your business depends on.
What to watch for when a tool is operating outside its capability — and how to set realistic expectations before you commit time and money.
Where humans must stay in the loop. The judgment calls, the relationships, the creative leaps AI can't replace — and why knowing this makes you more effective, not less.
Chris runs Clear Mountain Provisions, a candle company in Gainesville, Virginia. He's a Sergeant First Class and Master Intelligence Analyst in the New York Army National Guard, currently in his nineteenth year of service — which has run in parallel with eleven years of cybersecurity work since 2015. He deployed to Kuwait under Operation Enduring Freedom in 2011, and again to Bagram, Afghanistan in 2018 as a civilian intelligence professional embedded with Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan (SOJTF-A) and NATO Special Operations Component Command-Afghanistan (NSOCC-A).
By day he leads a cyber intelligence and insider-threat program supporting DHS / USCIS. He's also building production agentic AI systems for intelligence workflows and running Makers Manager — the SaaS platform for the handcrafted artisan community where he's CEO, Co-Founder, and the one building it, with AI as his entire development team. His pandemic intelligence work for the New York Joint Task Force was peer-reviewed in JAMA Health Forum. He writes more publicly about the intelligence and security side of the work at chris-cooley.com. Every lesson in Mountain Labs is tested against the work he's doing — production agentic systems, the candle business, the SaaS he's shipping — before it's taught to anyone else.
There's no shortage of AI education. Here's what you get here that the free videos and the $2,000 bootcamps don't give you.
Chris uses AI in production daily — in agentic intelligence workflows, in the SaaS he's shipping, in the candle business he runs. The lessons come from the field, not the classroom.
The thinking comes first. When a specific tool is the best fit, you'll hear it. When it isn't, you'll hear that too. The recommendations aren't sponsored, ever.
When a tool is overhyped, when a workflow won't survive contact with a working business, when you're better off without it — you'll be told plainly, before you spend the month.
Hallucination detection, confidence levels in outputs, source-checking habits — intelligence skills, applied to the work you do.
Not free and shallow. Not a $2,000 bootcamp. A real community at a price a real small business owner can say yes to.
One live Q&A every Tuesday, one deeper-dive workshop every month, and five always-on categories — the rhythm that keeps the work moving between sessions.
Same day, same time, held through Google Meet. Recorded for members who can't attend live. Bring a prompt, a tool question, a hallucination you caught.
The town square. Where members introduce themselves, share what they're working on, and meet the people they'll learn alongside.
Small business owners shipping things that work. Proof, posted by the people doing it — not testimonial copy on a sales page.
Which one, when, why. Direct answers from someone with no platform allegiance.
The patterns that worked, posted by the members who wrote them. A library you build by being in the room.
Where the course content lives. Sequential, structured, field-tested. Read in the order intended or jump to what you need.
Most AI education sits in one of two camps. Here is what you get with the third option.
Pricing, timing, who this is for, what happens after you join. Still missing something? Email chris@mountainlabs.ai — replies come from Chris, not a ticketing system.
A community for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and working professionals learning to use AI as a discipline. The community is where you pay to learn from Chris, get access to Chris, and work through AI adoption alongside peers. The course content lives inside it — it isn't sold separately.
Not yet. We're focused on the YouTube channel and the weekly Field Notes while we build the community right. Get on the waitlist and you'll be among the first invited when doors open — at the founding-member price.
One live Q&A every Tuesday at 7:00 PM ET with Chris, on Google Meet (recorded for those who can't attend). One deeper-dive workshop every month, also recorded and kept in the Classroom. A small private space organized around General discussion, Wins & results, Tool questions, Prompt sharing, and the Classroom — where the course content lives.
Seven foundational modules — Understanding AI — What AI Is and What It Isn't — Tool Selection — Writing Prompts That Get Useful Answers — Hallucination & Source Verification — Understanding Tool Limitations — What AI Cannot Do. New material is added as the field moves.
No. If anything, being technical can be a handicap for this material — it teaches you to reach for code before you've thought about the problem. Mountain Labs is built for smart, busy adults who run businesses or work with information for a living. No coding required, ever.
No. Field Notes is the free weekly email — one topic, 800 words or less, drawn from a working business scenario or analytical principle, honest about what AI can't do. The community is the paid product where the learning deepens. Subscribing to Field Notes also puts you on the list to be invited first when the community opens.
The 28-page primer is free — and it comes with the weekly Field Notes. The community opens soon. Waitlist gets invited first.