Natalie Luke
Co-founding 3rd Space simply added up for me
My career has always lived where creative judgment, technology and storytelling overlap. AI made the value of that intersection impossible to ignore.
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3rd Space Project · Seattle
Straight AI advice
for Pacific Northwest leaders.
We help mid-market companies figure out where AI fits, and what to do first.
Who this is for
You have been burned before.
You run a $10M to $500M company somewhere between Portland and Vancouver. You have talked to three AI vendors. One was priced for the Fortune 500. One had a slick deck and a junior team. One wanted to sell you a platform when you asked for a plan.
We are none of those.
- The founders do the work. Nothing gets handed off to a junior team.
- No vendor agenda. We tell you which tools fit and which do not, with no referral fees shaping the answer.
- Fixed scopes, measured in weeks, not quarters.
How we help
Three steps, each building on the last.
We are your guide to AI, not another vendor. Start wherever you are.
Step 1
Executive AI Leadership Workshop
Half-day (4 hours on-site) or full-day. Live demos on your own documents. Your leaders leave aligned, with real use cases sorted by risk and one pilot your team owns. A decision memo follows within a week, then a 30-day check-in.
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Step 2
AI Readiness Assessment
2–3 weeks. We find where AI is already in use and score readiness across strategy, data and privacy, people, tools, and governance. You get a scorecard, your top five use cases, and a 90-day plan.
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Step 3
AI Adoption Strategy
2–4 weeks, focused on one business unit. Three use cases built into full business cases, an honest vendor and build-or-buy review, a governance framework, and a roadmap with a named owner on every line.
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Half of what you pay for each step is credited toward the next one within 60 days. Guidance, not hands-on implementation. When it is time to build, we connect you with trusted partners.
The show
Volume Control!
We host a conversation with Pacific Northwest leaders using AI in the actual work. It is how we learn what buyers are really doing.
Season 1
Volume Control! launches in Fall 2026 with three conversations on day one, then a new episode every two weeks.
Field Notes
Short pieces on what we are seeing.
Written for the people doing the work. Not thought leadership.
Viet Nguyen
I didn’t set out to start an AI company
Five experiments, a closing trade association and a podcast idea with an old friend became the foundation for 3rd Space Project.
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Viet Nguyen
What three very different AI projects had in common
A publishing platform, a public-data tool and an executive workshop looked like three different assignments. Underneath, they depended on the same approach to AI: start with the real work, preserve human judgment and build for trust.
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Viet Nguyen
What actually works in AI right now
A practical guide to the AI tools, research methods and human safeguards that are producing useful work for organizations in 2026.
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Browse all 4 Field Notes
Who we are
Viet Nguyen and Natalie Luke.
Viet runs advisory. Nat runs brand and production. Both of us have shipped real work inside real organizations. We started 3rd Space Project because we kept meeting leaders who wanted straight answers and could not find them.
Working on an AI question that is not getting a clean answer?
Thirty minutes. Free. If we are not the right team, we will tell you who is.