Chad Holdridge

Scope spanned internal AI Operations infrastructure: methodology authorship, governance design, semantic-layer ownership, and the cross-functional operating rhythm across the active pilot portfolio.

• Led the lost-sales / out-of-stock analytics methodology for retailer-side category leadership at an enterprise convenience-retail pilot. Grounded in published academic out-of-stock research, it turned raw shelf data into prioritized, dollar-quantified actions and anchored the customer's commercial reviews and end-of-pilot results to executive leadership.
• Built the analytical approach that separated recoverable store-execution losses from non-recoverable supply-chain losses for a brand-side CPG sponsor — making brand-side ROI visible for the first time, where lumped metrics had previously obscured the value a sponsor could actually capture through their own investment. Became a reusable internal standard across CPG pilots.
• Authored the methodology and governance that made an internal agentic insights platform's outputs audit-defensible — every dollar figure traceable to a formula and data row, model behavior bounded by a versioned policy framework, and narrative output held to a domain-credible, anti-fabrication standard. Scope was methodology, governance, and the semantic layer; engineering implemented the platform and agent persona designs were owned by another engineer.
• Built a repeatable Solutions Engineering onboarding system from scratch — shipped as an internal Claude skill plus delivery pipeline. A five-minute structured interview with the onboarding partner generates a personalized Day-1 bundle on top of a canonical SE manual and a machine-readable systems-and-people index. Pre-renders to SharePoint-safe static HTML for reliable rendering across corporate-document environments. First hire onboarded on it; pattern being extended toward broader employee training automation.
• Productized internal automation as a reusable cross-pilot capability layer. Built a direct integration with an internal product API that replaced UI automation across every active pilot in the customer book. Built a multi-customer email ingestion platform with cross-pilot reusability. Built RAG v2 retrieval (hybrid BM25 + vector, cross-encoder reranking, incremental ingest). n8n + Gmail OAuth2 + Slack alerting foundation reusable across pilots.
• Owned the cross-functional AI operating rhythm across the active pilot portfolio. Roughly twenty internal stakeholders across Product, ML/inference, Data Science, Data Engineering, Account Directors, and Value Engineering; executive sponsors up to the company President level; customer-side relationships at each active pilot. KPI dashboards, executive scorecards, weekly cadence on program health and AI behavior accuracy against ground truth. Coordinated a hybrid team of Solutions Engineers and AI/Data contributors.

Reported to the Head of Deep Learning. Embedded as customer / Voice-of-Customer proxy on AI/ML model development and product roadmap.

• Co-led launch of Ada-Order (AI forecasting product) alongside Data Science as customer proxy and SME — guided model validation, use case scoping, and product integration roadmap from pilot through GA.
• Directed a distributed data labeling team for AI/ML training pipelines under Head of Deep Learning — owned workload planning, SOPs, QA feedback loops, and training data quality across CV model training cycles.
• Automated reporting workflows in Python and SQL — reduced turnaround 40% and surfaced model reliability metrics for executive decision-making.

• Introduced ‘Planogram Scan-in’ for FocalOS — partnered with Product and Design to ship a self-serve onboarding feature that lets retailers without consistent planogram-refresh processes build and update their store-specific planogram in real time by scanning UPCs at each shelf position, giving the CV models the canonical item-location data they lacked.
• Held the operator side of product design across enterprise pilot accounts: shaped AI/ML roadmap priorities across forecasting, replenishment, and on-shelf availability based on pilot feedback.

• Delivered $400K in cost savings through process redesign and SOX-compliant inventory and cash-management programs; led team of Inventory Managers and Analysts.

• People-leadership experience: scope growing from a team of 25 to a store organization of 150+ across 20+ years of progressive store leadership; total scope of ~600 people including dotted-line across 20 departments in a multi-store, matrixed regional organization.
• Full P&L responsibility for the store organization. Introduced Lean/CI tools across 35 departments and 7 stores; led 5 new store openings; mentored 20+ leaders into expanded responsibility.