Scott William Wilson is an entrepreneur, applied-AI practitioner, and educator who has spent more than 25 years at the intersection of digital marketing, technology, and business strategy. As the Founder and CEO of Geek Certified, a digital growth and applied-AI agency serving small and medium-sized businesses across Canada, Scott builds and operates custom AI agents, content automation systems, and AI-assisted production workflows for clients spanning industrial, professional services, healthcare, and e-commerce sectors. His agency practice covers the full modern search landscape, including SEO, SEM, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), disciplines focused on how brands surface inside AI-generated answers rather than traditional search results alone.
Scott serves as an AI instructor at McMaster University’s DeGroote School of Business, where he teaches AI Essentials for Marketing Professionals, a seven-week online micro-credential course with live sessions that prepares marketing professionals to put artificial intelligence to work immediately. The hands-on curriculum takes students from advanced prompt engineering and persistent AI memory techniques through building and launching their own Custom GPTs live in class, including a purpose-built SEO GPT that researches keywords, writes ranking content, and audits pages. Students then use AI to develop hyper-detailed Ideal Customer Profiles in hours rather than months, build auto-updating marketing dashboards with AI-generated executive summaries, and finish by presenting a complete AI marketing stack to earn a McMaster University micro-credential.
Scott is also a co-founder of The AI Faculty (theaifaculty.com), an AI education platform created with bestselling author and keynote speaker Jim Harris and Dr. Ruhai Wu of McMaster University, delivering keynotes, workshops, and enterprise AI training. His teaching philosophy is grounded in practice: the AI systems he builds for real businesses become the case studies he brings into the classroom.
Scott is the industry partner on a Mitacs Accelerate research grant, “Data-Driven Token Optimization for Large Language Models,” a 12-month project conducted with McMaster University. The project instruments real multi-client LLM workloads at Geek Certified to build an anonymized token-usage dataset, characterizes where tokens are actually spent across heterogeneous production workflows, and systematically evaluates optimization methods including learned and heuristic prompt and context compression, retrieval- and cache-aware context assembly, and reinforcement-learning-based adaptive model routing and token budgeting. The goal is to move efficient LLM serving from ad-hoc optimization toward evidence-based design principles that generalize across clients and tasks, while training skilled AI systems talent in Canada.
With a team of international researchers, Scott is developing an AEO/GEO research framework that connects AI visibility to business performance. The program addresses a question at the frontier of digital marketing: does how often and how prominently a firm appears in AI-generated answers actually drive business outcomes? The methodology combines structured business profiling, commercially relevant query generation, repeated AI simulations that establish expected visibility baselines, and abnormal-visibility monitoring linked to downstream performance measures such as conversions, engagement, and contact activity. The framework is designed to give partner organizations an evidence-based way to monitor their AI visibility and tie it directly to business goals, a capability that traditional analytics tools do not yet provide.
Beyond Geek Certified, Scott owns Reel Vision Studios, a video production company operating in Mississauga since 1999, and holds leadership roles in several Canadian technology ventures. He is a frequent speaker on practical AI adoption for business, advocating for AI education over hype and for solutions that augment human expertise rather than replace it. Off the clock, Scott is a rep-level youth hockey coach and a proud hockey dad based in Ontario.
As a member of the Digital Marketing Lab’s Academic Board, Scott bridges the Lab’s academic research with the realities of running client campaigns and AI systems in production, helping ensure that student projects, research insights, and industry partnerships deliver measurable, real-world value. Email wilsos77@mcmaster.ca with any questions.