Founder & Principal
Terence Milstead, PhD
Tech Adoption Strategist & Behavioral Insights Researcher
Terence Milstead specializes in adoption: how people take up a new product, service, or policy, what breaks, and what makes change stick. He combines behavioral insight, research rigor, and strategic communication to turn ambiguity into decisions teams can act on.
His work spans product, policy, and organizational change, and goes beyond building the thing to building trust, clarity, and repeatable behaviors around it. AI is the recent focus, but the problem is the same whatever is being built. In fact, his early career was in urban planning. Since then he has gone from studying how people navigate physical spaces to studying how they navigate digital spaces.
Through Second Mind Solutions, he helps clients de-risk their AI investments. Organizations adopting AI get workflows redesigned around how the work actually gets done. Teams building AI-enabled products get research that shows whether people will trust, adopt, and pay for them, from testing an AI banking concept before its MVP was built to calibrating an insurance propensity model for a new market. When either calls for engineering, Terence defines what gets built, directs a small bench of vetted technical partners, and stays accountable from diagnosis to delivery.
Before founding Second Mind, Terence led the user experience research function at CODE PA, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's inaugural digital services agency, including a year-long enterprise AI study conducted in partnership with OpenAI. He also conducted qualitative research for clients including Google and YouTube at Storyline Strategies, and earlier served as a Vice President at Ogilvy.
He started Second Mind after watching organizations invest seriously in AI and then struggle to connect it to how people actually work. The gap was rarely the technology. It was adoption, and closing it takes behavioral research, not generic training or vendor frameworks.
Terence also teaches undergraduate business communication as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Undergraduate Communications Program at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Connect on LinkedIn"When a client needs someone to bring together disparate ideas, challenging personalities, and multiple motivations, I think of Terence. He's a stellar facilitator, communicator, and strategist. We've worked together on big and small client projects and Terence always brings a new idea, an attention to detail and a global perspective."
Kellie Mullens Former Global Media/Presentation Coach, Ogilvy
"We partnered with Terence recently on some tech-related research and we were very happy with the results. He provided us with clear and actionable insights. We highly recommend him to anyone looking for a research-driven AI strategy for their org."
John Mitchell CEO, Avatar Insights
