Enterprise AI for the Twin Cities, built by someone who lives here

The Twin Cities punch well above their population. About 3.8 million people live in the metro, yet Minnesota placed 18 companies on the 2026 Fortune 500, and all but two of them are headquartered in the Twin Cities area: UnitedHealth Group in Minnetonka, Target and U.S. Bancorp in Minneapolis, 3M in Maplewood, General Mills in Golden Valley, Ecolab in St. Paul, and a dozen more. That concentration shapes what AI work looks like here. The buyers are large, regulated, risk-aware and already running serious data teams. They don't need a demo. They need systems that pass security review, survive an audit and move a number the CFO tracks.

That is the work I do. I spent 20 years in sales, paid acquisition, marketing technology, conversion optimization and analytics, including more than $50M in managed ad spend, before focusing on enterprise AI. Now I design, build and tune agentic workflows, RAG and knowledge systems, and on-prem or private AI infrastructure, along with the security and compliance work that has to come with them. Minnesota is home, so for Twin Cities teams the kickoff, the workshops and the launch happen in the same room.

The University of Minnesota anchors the local AI talent pipeline. In March 2026 it launched an AI Hub led by its first vice provost for AI, with a remit that spans research in agriculture, medicine and materials science, training for working professionals, and governance frameworks for AI use across the state. Its Minnesota Supercomputing Institute provides the GPU capacity behind the university's AI Makerspace. On the industry side, Medical Alley, the health and life sciences association, counts more than 800 health and technology organizations in its network and is headquartered in the Twin Cities.

The practical upshot for a Twin Cities company: the talent and infrastructure exist locally, but most enterprise AI programs here stall in the same place, between a promising pilot and a production system that security, compliance and the business will all sign off on. That gap is where I spend my time.

Minnesota is my home base, so working with a Twin Cities company is simple. I'm a short drive from Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburban corporate campuses, which means the kickoff, the process-mapping workshops with the people who do the work, and the launch can all happen on-site without travel budgets. Between those sessions the work runs remote: fixed scope, fixed price, a working demo every week, and a KPI agreed before any code is written. If the number isn't moving, you'll see it in the weekly demo, not in a final report.