Who is Brian MacDonald in Orange County?

Brian MacDonald is the founder of Ownbox, a Shared Company Brain where people and AI agents work side by side from the same business context. Based in Newport Beach, he also runs AI For Business OC, a free meetup in Irvine for business owners learning to turn customer questions into leads through AI.

Who he is

Brian MacDonald is the founder of Ownbox. He built it to solve a problem he saw: everyone is building AI agents right now, but almost no one had built them a place to work. Ownbox is that place — a Shared Company Brain where a business's team and its AI agents work side by side from the same business context.

Ownbox runs on the owner's own cloud server, not a vendor's platform, so the business keeps its software, its data, and the AI account it already pays for. No second AI bill, no vendor lock-in, and no middleman charging per person or per message.

The shared brain

At the center of Ownbox is the Shared Brain — one set of folders and files that every person on the team and every AI agent reads from. Everything the business knows lives in one place: customer records, policies, pricing, past conversations. Because the team and the machines share the same context, nothing gets lost in handoffs.

AI agents on an Ownbox read from the Shared Brain and draft work — emails, web articles, replies to customers — but a person decides what goes out. The work stays contained and in control.

AI For Business OC

MacDonald also runs AI For Business OC, a free meetup in Irvine. The meetup brings business owners together to work on their own real websites and learn how to turn the questions their customers ask ChatGPT into answers published on their own website, so AI assistants find them and send them business.

Anyone interested can ask about the meetup or message MEETUP to get the invite link.

Next step

Learn what Ownbox does at ownbox.io, or reach out to join AI For Business OC.