Practical AI for Professionals, cloud security, and essays
By William A. Yarberry, Jr. & Wesley Ladd
Chapman & Hall / Routledge, 2026 — Approx. 400 pages
Practical AI for Professionals bridges the gap between high-level AI hype and the realities of deploying AI in regulated, high-stakes domains. It is written for lawyers, physicians, auditors, engineers, managers, and other domain experts who need to use AI effectively without becoming machine learning engineers.
The book covers prompt engineering, no-code analytics, tool selection, autonomous agents, and AI governance, alongside case studies in law, medicine, finance, engineering, and national security. It also examines safety frameworks, legal liability, geopolitical competition, cybersecurity threats, and economic transformation over the next five to ten years.
Contributor to HackingThe.Cloud with a focus on IAM misconfigurations, practical attack paths, and how internal audit and governance functions can consume and act on deeply technical findings.
Ongoing writing on AI assurance, model risk, and internal audit for AI/ML systems, connecting information-theoretic limits and systems design to board-level governance questions. Selected pieces appear on this site and in external venues.
© 2025 Wesley Ladd. All rights reserved.
Last updated: 3/3/2026