
About
Spencer Saldana
AI is rewriting how businesses operate, and businesses are the substrate of how almost everything works in modern life. Hiring, schools, healthcare, what gets built, how people spend their days. The shape of the economy is the shape of society, with about a five year lag.
I've spent the last few years embedded with the people making the calls inside that transition. Operators, founders, CIOs, the executives trying to decide what to build and what to buy and what to ignore. The view from here is more interesting than the one you get from twitter, and a lot more grounded than the one you get from the keynotes.
I write about what I see. I build the things I'd want to exist. And I help the people deploying AI get more of it right than they otherwise would.
Work history
- Salesforce2021 to presentSolution Engineer, AI
- Designed and shipped agent systems, retrieval pipelines, and multi-system integrations for real production workloads inside large enterprises.
- Sit at the table with some of the largest PE firms in the world to learn what is actually working in their portfolios and what is not. The signal lives in the boring details.
- Help companies lay the groundwork that makes a real AI transformation possible. Data hygiene, governance, integration design, ownership models. The unglamorous prerequisites.
- Wunderman Thompson2017 to 2021Enterprise Architect
- Senior Analyst, then Solution Architect, then Enterprise Architect.
- Learned how to design and run major enterprise software projects end to end. API design, data modeling, integration patterns, the boring necessary parts that decide whether a project ships or quietly dies.
- Got an unvarnished education in how genuinely gargantuan an enterprise software implementation can be, and how to steer one when its own weight starts working against you.
- Accenture2015 to 2017Senior Business and Systems Integration Analyst
- Technical product owner on a large commerce platform. Requirements gathering, vendor coordination, integration design, global delivery.
- Northwestern University2011 to 2015B.S. Chemical Engineering, minor in Human Rationality and Consumer Decision-making
- Engineering rigor on one side. Behavioral economics on the other. Both still useful.
Credentials
- MIT xPro, Designing and Building AI Products and Services (2024)
- TOGAF 9 Certified Enterprise Architect (2020)
- Salesforce Certified AI Specialist (2024)
- Salesforce Certified Data Cloud Consultant (2024)
Outside
Hiking, tennis, pickleball, reading, making music, painting, and time with friends and family.