Thirty years of building taught me one thing: ship the thing that helps.

I'm Doug Liles, M.S. — founder and CEO of the Good Samaritan Institute (GoodSam.ai) and Good Combinator, and an elected Special District Commissionerin South Walton County, Florida (2020). I work at the intersection of applied AI and GovTech, host the AI for Good: Transforming Communities podcast, and am one of the few elected officials in Florida actively building and deploying auditable AI in public governance — for special districts, local government, and the nonprofits that serve them.

My path to AI didn't begin with software — it began with science. A Memphis native, I trained in the life sciences (a B.S. from the University of Tennessee and a Master of Combined Sciences from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where I was a scholar in medical microbiology). Through the Good Samaritan Institute I worked in cancer biology, oncology, and nanomedicine — taking part in programs of the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the National Cancer Institute's Translational Research Working Group. Somewhere along the way I stopped being impressed by what a new technology could do in a lab and started caring about what it actually did for the people on the other end of it.

That's why the Good Samaritan Institute (GoodSam.ai) now applies AI where it matters most — community services, environmental stewardship, education — and why I startedGood Combinator, an accelerator for mission-driven AI founders who want their AI to do good — and to prove it. Fast, ethical, auditable isn't a slogan; it's the bar every project has to clear.

That conviction carries into public service. Local government is where AI's promises meet potholes, stormwater, and public-records law — and where getting it right earns real trust. I work on the boring-but-critical stuff: transparent workflows, auditable decisions, and infrastructure that outlasts election cycles — the same standard behind DistrictOps, our auditable operations software for special districts.

Home base is a coastal campus near 30A in Santa Rosa Beach. Point Preserve hosts the gatherings — weddings, retreats, and group stays — while its siblingPoint Washington Preserve runs as a campus for AI founders: part residency, part lab, home to "Escape to Create" sessions where builders, researchers, and public servants leave with working prototypes, not just whiteboards.

That same hands-on ethos drives our Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Program — a competency-based certification system that trains people to translate ambiguous partner and customer problems into shipped AI and software value, not slideware. It certifies engineers the way the work actually happens: through time-on-task, reviewed artifacts, real partner interaction, and auditable credentials — all wrapped in an ongoing training and support ecosystem, so certified FDEs keep leveling up long after they earn the credential.

Talk to us about the FDE Program →

In June 2026, I delivered “Unmasking AI for Special Districts” at the Florida Association of Special Districts Annual Conference.

When I'm not consulting or in commission meetings, I'm hostingAI for Good: Transforming Communities, a podcast about people using AI to make their corner of the world measurably better.