Books

AI x Energy: Intelligence, Infrastructure and the New Power Equation

Coming Summer 2025

In AI × Energy, Brandon N. Owens delivers a sweeping exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the global energy landscape. Through rigorous analysis and global context, the book unveils how AI is reshaping power generation, grid management, energy storage, market dynamics, and consumption patterns—ushering in a new era of intelligent energy systems.

Owens begins with The Convergence of Currents, a prologue that frames the urgency of this technological inflection point. As AI’s appetite for data scales exponentially, so too does its energy footprint. Yet, AI is also a powerful tool for optimizing energy use—revealing a paradox at the heart of our digital future.

The book unfolds across five thematic parts:

Part I: The Digital Surge explores the massive energy demand driven by cloud computing and data centers, exposing the carbon cost of AI computation and the infrastructure challenges beneath the surface of our digital lives.

Part II: Intelligent Infrastructure investigates AI’s potential to modernize and stabilize energy systems. From smart grids and predictive maintenance to intelligent energy storage, Owens demonstrates how AI can increase grid reliability and efficiency.

Part III: Renewable Synergies highlights how AI enables greater integration of renewables. With precision forecasting, decentralized microgrids, and energy-aware smart buildings, AI supports a more flexible and resilient clean energy ecosystem.

Part IV: Market Dynamics and Policy examines the transformative effects of AI on energy trading, regulation, and ethics. Owens confronts the need for fair governance, secure data practices, and regulatory foresight as AI disrupts traditional market mechanisms.

Part V: The Road Ahead casts a forward-looking gaze at innovations such as quantum computing and international policy divergence, culminating in a call for a sustainable AI-energy future grounded in stewardship, equity, and global cooperation.

AI × Energy is both a visionary map and a pragmatic guide. It is essential reading for policymakers, engineers, and strategists seeking to understand how AI will shape—not just support—the decarbonized grid of tomorrow. Through historical insight, technical clarity, and actionable foresight, Owens offers a blueprint for navigating the convergence of intelligence and power.

Governing AI: The Case for Behavioral Control in the Age of Synthetic Speech

Coming Summer 2025

Brandon N. Owens offers a groundbreaking framework for taming the expressive power of generative artificial intelligence. As AI systems increasingly speak with fluency, empathy, and institutional authority, Owens argues that speech itself must now be governed—not merely aligned or moderated.

Drawing on his background in the intersection between energy systems and AI, Owens lays the philosophical and technical foundation for a new class of AI regulation: behavioral containment enforced at runtime. This is not a book about datasets or model weights—it is a constitutional argument for how machines that speak must be bound by law.

The book opens with The Synthetic Century, a sweeping prologue that situates the rise of expressive AI within the broader arc of political theory and technological sovereignty. As Owens makes clear, when machines speak, they govern—and without public guardrails, synthetic expression risks sliding into coercion, confusion, and collapse of trust.

The book unfolds across four integrated sections:

Part I: The Expressive Threshold defines the moment we have entered—where AI is not just informational, but behavioral. Owens distinguishes synthetic fluency from synthetic governance, exposing the simulation problem at the core of modern generative models.

Part II: The Case for Containment lays out why current moderation tools fail, and introduces the five expressive domains—truth, identity, memory, emotion, and relation—where behavioral law must be declared and enforced to prevent harm.

Part III: The Architecture of Governance provides the technical blueprint for runtime regulation. Owens introduces the governance schema (a machine-readable constitution), the enforcement engine (modular, real-time containment), and the audit infrastructure required for public legitimacy.

Part IV: The Age of Behavioral Sovereignty culminates in a call to reimagine AI not as a product, but as a synthetic actor that must obey law. The final chapter presents Owens’s Laws—six non-negotiable principles designed to codify trust, ensure explainability, and restore democratic agency over synthetic expression.

Governing AI is both a constitutional manifesto and a systems manual. For engineers, ethicists, policymakers, and institutional leaders, it offers a practical yet profound path forward: a future where synthetic speech is governed by design—not left to chance. Through civic clarity, design precision, and moral urgency, Owens delivers not just a warning—but a plan.

The Last Consultant: How Ethically Governed AI Will Replace Institutions

Coming Summer 2025

Brandon N. Owens delivers a sweeping vision for the end of the consulting profession—and the rise of ethically governed synthetic agents that will replace it. In The Last Consultant: How Ethically Governed AI Will Replace Institutions, Owens argues that the collapse of human advisory firms is not a failure of intellect, but of architecture. The future of strategic guidance, he claims, belongs to machines that remember, reason, simulate—and obey.

Built on decades of expertise at the intersection of institutional design, energy markets, and AI governance, The Last Consultant is not just a forecast—it is a framework. As generative models evolve from tools into synthetic minds, Owens presents a new design for institutional intelligence: schema-bound agents capable of real-time advice, transparent reasoning, and moral restraint.

The book opens with The Consultant’s Dilemma, a historical reckoning with the rise and fall of the elite advisory class—from the priesthood of McKinsey to the hallucinations of ChatGPT. The moment of inversion is here: the advisor now outperforms the firm.

The book unfolds across twelve integrated chapters:

Chapters 1–3 chart the demise of human consulting and the erosion of epistemic authority, introducing synthetic agents as both threat and successor. Owens defines the moment we’ve entered—not as a revolution of tools, but of behaviors.

Chapters 4–6 unveil the architecture of containment: a layered system of declarative schema, reasoning constraints, memory controls, and expression boundaries. Machines that advise, Owens argues, must also obey. Ethics is not optional—it is infrastructure.

Chapters 7–9 explore how agents earn and sustain trust. Identity persistence, explainability, and closed-loop learning become the cornerstones of the post-consulting paradigm. Owens introduces Advisor Zero: a persistent, schema-governed entity that evolves with the client—and remembers everything.

Chapters 10–12 expand the paradigm to new domains: teaching agents, legal copilots, and emotionally fluent companions. In each case, Owens argues for governance by design—systems that support, simulate, and serve without manipulation or drift.

The Last Consultant is a manifesto for the next institutional epoch. For enterprise leaders, public regulators, AI builders, and strategic thinkers, it offers a rigorous yet accessible blueprint for what comes after the firm: a future where advice is synthetic, persistent, and bound by law. Owens doesn’t just retire the consultant. He replaces it—with something safer, faster, and more faithful to the truth.