Alto Gary.
Business Strategy · Customer Experience · AI Systems

I make complexity
look effortless.

Strategy that survives contact with execution.

I lead where marketing, customer experience and partnerships meet the intelligent systems that deliver them. The discipline comes from running operations that could not fail in public. The work now is building the workflows that carry brand and judgment at scale.

Hiring or recruiting? Start here

MBA · East Carolina University Thomas D. Arthur Graduate School of Business Based in the US · Working globally
NFLNBATurner BroadcastingWWEWNBA ParamountMLSMTVEverlast Pro Football Hall of FameHouston Texans NFLNBATurner BroadcastingWWEWNBA ParamountMLSMTVEverlast Pro Football Hall of FameHouston Texans

Five systems, running

Screenshots of the real interfaces
The practice

Five capabilities that only matter together

Most people who understand customers cannot build the system. Most people who can build the system have never had to hold a room. Select any capability to see what it connects to, and where it shows up in real work.

Five capabilities

The overlap is the point

Each of these is common on its own. Held together by one operator they compound: strategy that survives execution, systems that carry brand voice, partnerships that actually run after the announcement.

Where it shows up Five projects below Select a capability

Hover, tap or press Tab

How it works

I work at the orchestration layer

Deciding which systems belong together, how they hand work to one another, where humans stay in control, and how performance is judged.

The panel is not decoration. It is the shape of what I build, and the lilac stage is the one I never automate away.

Orchestration layer
01IntakeBrand voice, product truth, support historyStructured
02RetrievalGoverned knowledge baseRAG
03AgentsDraft, route, summarizeMulti-agent
04Human in the loopJudgment stays hereControl
05EvaluationTone, brand fit, customer valueScored
06DeliveryConsistent across every channelLive

Live trace · hover any stage

Selected work

Evidence, not adjectives

Real interfaces, captured from the running systems. Each one is labeled for exactly what it is, because a concept demonstration and a live product are not the same claim.

Carson July · product

Partnership Intelligence Platform

Know everyone before the room.

The business problem
Partnership conversations are won before the meeting starts. The research that wins them already exists. It is just never in one place, in one voice, at the moment someone has to walk in and ask.
What I did
Defined the dossier standard: what an executive needs to know about a sponsor or a decision-maker, in what order, at what confidence. Then designed the command center and built it.

Judgment I used to apply deal by deal, turned into a product other people can run without me.

Partnership Intelligence dashboard headed 'Know everyone before the room. Win the partnership.' with a research prompt field and counters for organizations researched, sponsors tracked, contacts found and activations documented.

Screenshot of the running application

Concept demonstration

Pirate Connect 360

Less admin. More alumni.

The business problem
Alumni chapters run on volunteer time, and that time disappears into rosters, outreach and follow-up. The relationship work the chapter exists for is the first thing squeezed out.
What I did
Built an independent concept end to end: the engagement premise, the chapter command center, and an assistant that drafts the plan so a volunteer leader edits instead of starting cold.

An organizational problem taken to a credible operating surface, with the simulated figures labeled on screen.

Independent concept demonstration Explore Pirate Connect 360
View concept details
Pirate Connect 360 introduction flow, showing how two alumni are matched and introduced.
Connect Live · the introduction itself
Pirate Connect 360 chapter command center, showing the assistant prompt and chapter metrics.
Chapter command center · the operating surface
What a volunteer leader gets
A command center with six working areas: overview, events, volunteers, outreach, insights and follow-up. An assistant drafts the event plan, the volunteer assignments and the follow-up, so the leader edits rather than starts from nothing.
How the matching works
Alumni are matched on what they are actually looking for, career, mentorship, entrepreneurship or simply meeting fellow Pirates, and each introduction states the reason it was made rather than presenting a score with no explanation.
What is real and what is not
Every person, organization and figure in the concept is invented for the demonstration, and the interface says so on screen rather than in a footnote. It is an independent concept, not affiliated with, endorsed by or commissioned by East Carolina University or the ECU Alumni Association.
Pirate Connect 360 chapter command center headed 'Less admin. More Pirates.' showing an assistant prompt, a Generate Event Plan button, and tiles for engaged alumni, events this season, volunteer hours and average event rating, marked 'Simulated · Illustrative data'.

Independent concept · not affiliated with or endorsed by any institution
All figures simulated

Retrieval system · demo build

Operations Assistant

An assistant that will tell you when it does not know.

The business problem
On an event day the person who needs the credentialing rule has a radio in one hand and ninety seconds. An assistant that guesses in that moment is worse than no assistant at all.
What I did
Built retrieval over four operations manuals with a fixed answer format: primary source, supporting sources, a confidence rating, the procedural language verbatim. When the manuals do not cover it, it says so instead of inventing policy.

Retrieval, citation and calibrated refusal as product behavior, not as a policy nobody reads.

Demo build · fictional source material Explore Demo
Operations Assistant interface with a query field for operational guidance, four indexed source manuals marked primary and secondary, a six-part response format including a confidence rating, and ten topic-coverage tags.

Built on a fictional conference’s materials
Footer reads “event staff retain final operational authority”

AltoV Beauty · live product

Shade Finder

Three shades, and you get the final say.

The business problem
Shade matching from a photo is the feature every beauty brand wants and the one most likely to embarrass it. A confident wrong answer costs a return and a customer, and asking someone to upload their face to a server costs their trust.
What I did
Designed and built the customer experience end to end: the framing guidance that gets a usable photo, the analysis that reads skin tone on the device so the image is never uploaded or stored, and a result that returns the closest match plus one lighter and one darker rather than asserting a single answer.

An AI feature that earns trust by giving the customer the last word, and the privacy to use it.

AltoV Beauty Shade Finder headed 'Find your true shade', with framing guidance for the photo, options to take or upload a photo, and a note that the image is analyzed on the device and never uploaded or stored.

Screenshot of the live application
Photo analyzed on the device · never uploaded or stored

Operating practice · agent-native systems

Running agents the way a show is run

Nothing goes live because it seemed fine.

The business problem
Teams adopt agents faster than they adopt any way of telling whether the agents are behaving. When something does go wrong, there is no record of what was approved, what actually ran, or who decided.
What I did
Stood up and operated an agent-native stack on my own Linux VPS: multi-agent workflows coordinated through Mattermost threads, approvals routed to me before anything executed, scoped secrets, and evidence captured at every stage. Then I drilled it. I planted a failure mid-pipeline to prove the stop actually stops, recorded the correction in my own words, and reran clean from the start with separate artifacts throughout.

Standing an agentic system up, operating it, and proving to someone else whether it is behaving.

Attribution. The underlying framework and its agents are AI Build Lab's work, not mine. The implementation, configuration, operation, evaluation, failure testing and documentation described here are my own.

Operating practice · synthetic proof run

System diagram of one synthetic proof run
Drawn from my own receipt, not a screenshot

More work and methods
Evaluation method

AI Response Evaluation & Brand Alignment

A technically correct assistant reply that repeated itself, asked the customer to do the work, and missed an obvious commercial moment. I scored it against a four-part rubric, then rewrote it. The rubric is the deliverable: it makes the next thousand responses reviewable by someone other than me.

Read the full method
Internal system

Unified assistant suite

Specialized assistants for content, scheduling, insights, support and analysis that hand work to each other instead of sitting in separate tabs. Each owns a narrow job and draws on the same knowledge base and brand rules.

Retrieval

Structured knowledge bases

Product truth, brand voice guidance, support history and operating instructions structured into one governed source that assistants draw from, so the answer is the same whether it comes from support, from sales or from the website.

Capability · advisory

Partnerships & growth strategy

Partnership and sponsorship strategy for sports organizations, NIL companies and emerging sports businesses: define what the partnership is genuinely for, make the value legible to both sides, and build the operating rhythm that keeps it working after the announcement.

See the brand & partnership portfolio
The through-line

Where the discipline was forged

The stage changed. The discipline did not. These are the capabilities I lead with today, and the environments that taught them. Read it as provenance, not biography.

Today · Orchestration

Sequencing complex work

Deciding what happens, in what order, owned by whom, and what must be true before the next stage begins. It is the core of every agentic workflow I design.

Forged in

Live production, where the sequence either holds or the audience sees it fail. Opening Ceremonies, two Super Bowls in Houston, and television production at Turner Broadcasting.

Super Bowl LI signage outside NRG Stadium in Houston.
Today · Customer experience

Governing tone at scale

Making brand voice explicit enough that a model applies it the same way on the thousandth interaction as on the first, and building the evaluation that proves it.

Forged in

Brand marketing across the NFL, NBA, WWE, Paramount and MTV, where a single off-voice moment reaches millions before anyone can correct it.

Houston Texans Cheerleaders Halloween Bash promotional creative, with Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft sponsorship branding.
Today · Partnerships

Making value legible to both sides

Structuring agreements and growth strategy so each party can see precisely what they get, what they owe, and how it will be measured.

Forged in

Sponsorship and partnership work across major sports properties, agency-side negotiation, NIL companies and emerging sports businesses.

Partnership Intelligence Platform dashboard showing partnership value tracked and measured for both parties.
Today · Quality & governance

Rehearsal as an evaluation loop

Catching drift before the audience does. Structured scoring, human checkpoints and repeatable standards, so quality is reviewable by someone other than the person who built it.

Forged in

Live rehearsal discipline, where you run it again until it holds under pressure, and nobody watching ever knows how hard it was.

Tools & methods

What I can get done, and how close I am to it

Grouped by the outcome rather than by the vendor, and marked by how I actually work with each one. Not everything on this page is something I use every day, and the marks say which is which.

Hands-on, regularly Method I apply Supporting, as the work requires

Build and ship it

I build the thing, put it somewhere real, and operate it.

Hands-on
  • Claude Code
  • Git
  • GitHub
  • Vercel
  • Command line
  • Node.js
  • Linux / Ubuntu
  • Hostinger VPS

Make AI answer from what is true

One governed source, and answers that arrive with their receipts attached.

Method
  • Retrieval (RAG)
  • Structured knowledge bases
  • Source citation
  • Calibrated refusal
  • Information architecture
Supporting
  • Supabase
  • Firecrawl
  • Notion
  • Google Workspace

Coordinate more than one agent

Agents handing work to each other on a defined sequence, with the stopping points written down first. I implement and operate these stacks; I do not author the frameworks underneath them.

Hands-on
  • Hermes runtime
  • Mattermost agent threads
  • Claude
  • MCP
Method
  • Agent-native architecture
  • Multi-agent coordination
  • Orchestration design
  • Task handoff
Supporting
  • ChatGPT
  • Google AI Studio

Prove it is good

Quality someone other than the builder can review, and drift caught before a customer finds it.

Method
  • AI evaluation
  • Scoring rubrics
  • Failure drills
  • Signed receipts
  • Named residuals
  • Brand voice QA
Hands-on
  • Langfuse
  • Trace review
  • Evidence capture

Keep a person in control

The part most AI programs discover they needed only after something went out.

Method
  • Human approval gates
  • Goal contracts
  • Stop conditions
  • Fail-closed defaults
  • Scoped access
Hands-on
  • Approval routing
  • Infisical
  • Scoped machine identities

Reach the customer

Where the systems meet the person they were built for.

Method
  • CX strategy
  • Journey design
  • Brand voice at scale
  • APIs & webhooks
Supporting
  • Shopify
  • MailerLite
  • Canva
  • Make
  • Zapier
  • Fillout
Press & recognition

What other people have written

ECU College of Business

Ditching rock and roll for an MBA

East Carolina University's College of Business on the move from live entertainment production into business strategy, and the MBA that formalized it.

Read the ECU feature
Ebony Magazine

Featured in Ebony

Featured during a run of work spanning music, live entertainment and national brand campaigns. A print feature, from before the archive went online.

For executives & recruiters

The short version

If you are evaluating me for a role, this is the part worth two minutes. Everything above it is the evidence.

NowBusiness strategist and AI systems builder working across marketing, customer experience, partnerships, and operations. I design and implement intelligent workflows that turn complex business needs into practical solutions.
EducationMBA, East Carolina University, Thomas D. Arthur Graduate School of Business.
Professional Development & Credentials
  • Agent Native (Advanced) Course: Build the Fleet that Builds Agent Native Co’s Maven · Issued October 2026
  • Install an AI Agent Team + HQ in One Day with Claude Code (w/o Coding Skills) Maven · Issued June 2026
Brand sidePartnership marketing and brand experience across the NFL, NBA, WNBA, WWE, the Olympic Games, Turner Broadcasting, Paramount, MTV and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Live pressureSuper Bowl XXXVIII and Super Bowl LI, including halftime show production for XXXVIII, in environments where timing, coordination and execution had to hold under live pressure.
Open toRoles across AI enablement, customer experience, partnerships and growth, and business operations. Consulting through Carson July.

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