Fifteen years turning enterprise data and AI from strategy into shipped, governed
systems - across financial services, insurance, and life sciences. I also write
about the part nobody warns you about: where agentic AI quietly breaks in
production, and how to engineer around it.
Led
75+engineers led across enterprise teams
$317MM+realized and projected value - cost reduction, automation & ML$52MM realized cost avoidance + $265MM projected 3‑year profit from ML
Line counts 14/7/4 and 2 gated are illustrative weights, not measurements.
Drawn by code, not generated by a model: every figure on this site is a
deterministic render - the same discipline the essays argue for, applied to
the essays themselves.
Before forward-deployed engineering had its current label, implementation engineers and consultants were already walking operations, translating domain rules, and making software survive contact with reality.
2014The year this work meant walking a regulated manufacturing floor and translating operations into validated software - before the FDE label.
I’m Tom. I’ve spent fifteen years building data and AI systems in
industries where a wrong answer costs real money - pharma, consumer finance,
insurance, and now private equity. The question that runs through all of it:
not “can AI do this?” but “can you trust what comes out enough to act on it?”
This site is where I work that question in public. The writing and views here
are my own.
Now
Advisory Lead, Applied AI - West Monroe
Lead architect and technical leader for a new 50-person Applied AI practice delivering AI strategy and forward-deployed engineering for private equity firms and their portfolio companies. Built an outside-in research-synthesis platform for PE diligence, with the MVP released in 8 weeks.
2024 - 2026
Data & AI platform lead - Group 1001 (insurance)
Led the platform teams behind the group’s document AI and data estate - ~960k orchestrated production jobs a year at a 99.4% success rate, 1.1M documents a year processed at 80% lower cost. The transfer-automation work won the 2025 Gartner Eye on Innovation Award.
2021 - 2024
ML platform lead - Discover Financial Services
Led the build of a high-performance ML platform - three teams, ~40 engineers - that accelerated model deployment by 60% and supported 50+ models projected to drive $250MM+ in three-year profit before tax.
2018 - 2021
Automation organization lead - Discover Financial Services
$52MM in annual cost avoidance across an enterprise automation portfolio.
Foundations
Georgia Tech & Loyola Chicago
MS in Computational Analytics; BS in Biophysics (cum laude).
