The founder

Before Zambarch, I founded and ran Wise Woofs, a science-based canine education company with a staff of fifteen to twenty. When ChatGPT first opened to the public we tried it inside the business. Our people were better, so it went on a shelf. My payroll was on the line and so was that decision, which meant I owned whether any tool we paid for earned its place. Almost no firm gives anyone that responsibility.

Fifteen years of probability work, where being wrong costs money, taught me that kind of judgment. Poker solvers first: software that computes optimal play at a table, built on the same family of machine learning as today’s AI. Then daily fantasy models, one of which won $1M on DraftKings. The machines gave answers. Knowing which to trust was my job, and that discipline goes into every AI stack I read now.

I studied International Business at Rollins College, in a program accredited by AACSB, and later took MIT Sloan’s “AI for Business Strategy” certificate to put formal structure under what I had learned by doing. Standards came earlier, though, from watching good people outperform tools they were promised.

Everything we do rests on one sentence. Firms that buy AI without an owner for the return see none. PwC measured the outcome: of 4,454 CEOs surveyed, 56 percent reported no significant financial benefit from AI to date. At Wise Woofs I was that owner, and AI stayed out until it could earn its cost. Most firms have no one whose job is to say whether the AI paid off. I take that job. The audit puts in writing what every tool you pay for returns against its cost. When the findings call for a build, we size it as its own project. Either way, you know what AI is worth to your firm.

PwC, 29th Global CEO Survey · n = 4,454