Aug 2021 – Dec 2022 · 1 yr 4 mos · Chicago, Illinois, United States

• Key contributor to evangelism, brand, revenue, and marketing.
• Brand and evangelism:
• o Key DataRobot voice of brand globally, covering major swath of the world including face-to-face visits with C-level execs in North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia.
• o Co-host of award-winning More Intelligent Tomorrow podcast with luminaries such as Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics author), Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, General David Petraeus, Dodger world champion Orel Hershiser.
• o Co-organize virtual conferences (7,000 attendees), keynote globally at AI conferences.
• o Initiated McLaren partnership, largest in company history: help run global joint sales and marketing events around Formula 1, assist the racing strategy and engineering teams to bring AI models to production, and joint marketing including “Behind the Wheel” game activation to 60+ million followers.
• Revenue:
• o $45M+ revenue involvement of various degrees (plus $29M in potential pipeline), a significant portion of DataRobot's global sales.
• o Key account pipeline generation: global travel side-by-side with our top salespeople across verticals to prospects, customer expansion, events, popular “An Evening with Ari” dinners, AI workshops along McLaren events. Seen as a trusted AI thought leader to hundreds of C-level customers (40% of Fortune 50) and prospects. Inspire them to get started with AI, or to the next level of AI maturity.
• Marketing
• o Media personality who is on air correspondent for national television, podcasts, news sites, radio, short-form video content, and documentaries.
• o Led key global customer marketing initiatives (2019-2020): Developed “AI Hero” website, customer spotlights, case studies, customer webinars, LinkedIn Lives, blogs, analyst relations. Both hands-on content writing and team management. Implement repeatable process and metrics. Co-build our community (prior to DataRobot was President of the global Oracle Users Group with 22,000 members).

Apr 2019 – Aug 2021 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Chicago, Illinois, United States

• DataRobot is the leading enterprise AI platform. Our mission is to help people optimize the world using data.

May 2017 – Feb 2019 · 1 yr 9 mos · Greater Chicago Area

• Led the data science practice, focusing on advanced analytics in marketing mix analytics, media, customer analytics, pricing, promotion, finance, and risk.
• Partner with IBM and H2O in highly-visible keynotes globally, demonstrating IBM’s ecosystem using baseball analytics. A $20mm MLB baseball player contract was signed based on our analytic forecasts.
• Example win: led initiative to build statistical models to predict first-year store sales, analyzing factors to classify shopper elasticities and population segmentations. Created unique and predictive derived feature sets and iterated model for each US Zip code to recommend new store locations. Improved model fits dramatically and optimized tens of millions of annual client spend.
• Modeling approaches: Random Forest, GBoost, Lasso Logistic, Mixed Effects Logistic Regression, customer journey, path to purchase, K-Means ; Insights applied: Churn, LTV, RFM, MROI ;
• Aginity Amp is the leading analytics management workbench with nearly 12,000 companies handling over a million SQL queries per week

Nov 2015 – Apr 2017 · 1 yr 5 mos · Greater Chicago Area

• Principal in the Strategic Analytics practice, focused on deriving customer value through machine learning and data science. Led end-to-end client engagements at Frito-Lay, Starbucks, Duracell, Smuckers, and more. Deliver hundreds of millions of dollar growth and value for clients through leading teams of modelers and analysts, thought leadership, product innovation, and new business sales. Development environment of R, SQL, Shiny, Hadoop, Tableau.

Jan 2015 – Mar 2023 · 8 yrs 2 mos

Aug 2013 – Dec 2018 · 5 yrs 4 mos

• Three playoff appearances and the best AL winning percentage over first five seasons. 2018 was as key trade evaluator leading to 14 ML prospects and international bonus while significantly reducing payroll by $50 million.

Aug 2013 – Jan 2015 · 1 yr 5 mos · Greater Chicago Area

• Regional Midwest lead for the Marketing Effectiveness practice (Marketing Mix, Social Media analytics, Pricing, Promotion, Revenue). Hired, mentored, and managed 60+ staff to deliver strategic client insights.
• Collaborated across Nielsen departments to bring innovation and solution integrations. Led the practice’s NPD partnership which resulted in significant business and multi-year client contracts.
• Client Lead for several of the world’s largest CPG manufacturers including Kimberly-Clark, Energizer, Clorox, Nestle, and Morton Salt. With executive relationships and value selling, expanded client business over 40% year-over-year. One client realized over $120MM in value from team’s work, and trained 700 retail sales team members with data-driven insights to win at the customer and channel levels.

Jan 2013 – Present · 13 yrs 5 mos · Chicago, Illinois, United States

• Instructor of the popular "Sports AI and Analytics" and "Baseball Analytics" courses. Gained widespread visibility when Royals Manager Mike Matheny took the course and promoted across media on the MLB Network, The Athletic, and press conferences. Course link: https://www.sportsmanagementworldwide.com/courses/data-science-analytics

Jun 2010 – Aug 2012 · 2 yrs 2 mos · Greater Chicago Area

• Full-time 2010-2012, consultant 1996-2009. Created and managed the Cubs analytics department. Brought in by ownership and advised on key decisions across the business, including the process to select, negotiate, and hire President Theo Epstein. Contributed to and assisted all aspects of baseball operations including player evaluations, game strategy, coaching, Minor League & player development, scouting, advance scouting, draft, international, video, software development, and technology. Installed the first minor league video and Sportvision/mechanics capture at all six Cubs affiliates - the most for any organization.
• Optimized $110M payroll, setting the groundwork for transforming from a last-place organization to one currently in first pennant chase in seven seasons. Created and led the analytics department and collaborated with all departments to incorporate data-driven decisions and business intelligence. Developed proprietary player projection system and solutions for managers, coaches, and players.

Jun 2009 – Jan 2018 · 8 yrs 7 mos

• Scoutables - Major League Analytics for Everyone. daily scouting reports on every player in Major League Baseball based on recent performance. Scoutables (formerly AriBall) is built on top of the most sophisticated baseball analytics platform around. The product of a collaboration between Ari Kaplan and Fred Claire, has offered comprehensive baseball analytics to MLB front offices, media and broadcast outlets, scouts and coaches for almost a decade.

Jan 2006 – Nov 2009 · 3 yrs 10 mos

• Managed the critical Oracle and Business Applications Practice for Datalink, driving practice revenue to $30M annually. 107% year-over year in 2008, 153% in 2007 and 62% in 2006 and bringing company to profitability for the first time in over three years.
• Datalink is a leading storage architect public company with approximately $300M in revenue. Datalink is the top NetApp partner in the USA and one of the top partners of EMC, Hitachi, Symantec, VMWare, and others.
• Helped close multi-million dollar deals with Cingular, Fidelity, and Anheuser-Busch all within first two quarters of employment, and subsequently $7M and $10M deals.

May 2005 – Jun 2008 · 3 yrs 1 mo

• The Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) is an independent user-driven organization comprised of more than 22,000 Oracle database administrators, developers, technical managers and other Oracle professionals. The IOUG serves its members and the broader Oracle community by delivering the highest quality information, education, networking and advocacy through its Web site, its annual technical Symposium and by channeling the voice of the customer to Oracle Corp. and their business partners. Since becoming EVP in 2003 and then President in 2005, overall membership more than doubled, cash reserves increased over 50%, and participation in SIGs (special interest groups) increased 100%. New SIGs included included organizations as PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Java.
• Initiated and executed the first co-located Oracle user group conference with OAUG (Applications) and Quest (JD Edwards) resulting in 200% increase in conference attendance and 80% increase in vendor participation (250+ vendors).
• Managed over 200 staff and volunteers to provide a wide spectrum of member benefits and events.

Nov 1999 – Jul 2005 · 5 yrs 8 mos · Chicago

• Expand Beyond was a leading pioneer of the mobile business software market. The company's mobile/wireless IT management products enable database (Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, IBM), network, and system administrators to control enterprise IT infrastructures from wireless handheld devices. Raised over $16 million (led by Menlo Ventures) including the largest first-round funding for Illinois in 2001. Expand Beyond retained an impressive customer roster, executed OEM and partnerships with companies such as Teradata and Microsoft, and was issued several broad patents in mobile software. Opened EMEA offices in Paris and ASIA-PAC in Tokyo. Chairman of BOD that included founders of Teradata and Hotmail and former CEO of the CBOT.

Jan 1994 – Dec 1999 · 5 yrs 11 mos

• At PriceWaterhouseCoopers worked for Emerging Solutions Group, using breakthrough approaches to uncover hidden consumer purchase patterns. The best-selling book, “How Hits Happen”, written about successes.
• Booz Allen Hamilton: worked with Merck & Co: The OMS (Order Management System) application was used to place billions of dollars of orders and track all inventory for the world's largest pharmaceutical corporation. Played a senior role on a team of 50 to design and implement this mission-critical application providing the backbone for this $60 billion market-cap company. Application successfully rolled out in over 100 countries on-time and on-budget.
• 3Com/U.S. Robotics: implementation and upkeep of over 40 applications for the world's leading manufacturer of modems. Applications managed included just-in-time manufacturing, R&D, Scopus, HR. Helped to successfully merge applications after US Robotic’s $6.6B acquisition from 3Com.
• Hallmark: Was lead administrator for www.hallmark.com’s databases. At the time this was one of the top-ten e-commerce websites on the Internet, and successfully implemented and supported applications that were some of the largest in volume and concurrent transaction handling worldwide

Jun 1992 – Jul 1994 · 2 yrs 1 mo

• For each of these high-profile clients, served as project manager and consultant: Clients include Department of the Navy, Computer Science Corporation, Bell Atlantic, Baltimore Gas and Electric, NavComTelSta, FDIC, Tennessee Valley Authority, Computer and Electronic Communications.

May 1992 – May 1996 · 4 yrs

• The Expos Scouting Project provides front-end screens to retrieve Major League and Minor League data for scouts, managers, and players, and assists in the drafting process as well as the entire scouting and player development departments.

May 1991 – Dec 1991 · 7 mos · San Diego

• The Padres Computer Project provides front-end screens to retrieve data for scouts, managers, and players, and assists the entire scouting and player development departments. Reported to GM Joe McIlvaine, worked with players including HOF Tony Gwynn

May 1990 – Dec 1990 · 7 mos

• Reported directly to hall of famers Frank Robinson and Roland Hemond. The Orioles Computer System and Earl Weaver Statistics Program provided Major League and Minor League player information.