Founded by Dr. Richard Kerr, PhD, MBA: 22 years of professional AI, four enterprise AI functions built at market leaders, and a firm run on the same governed discipline it advises.
Dr. Richard Kerr has practiced professional AI for 22 years, beginning at Virginia Tech's CMMID in 2004. He has built four enterprise AI functions at market leaders: CMMID, IDEXX, Daisy Brand, and PepsiCo.
At PepsiCo he scaled the machine learning function from 3 people to more than 70 across four continents. The market-mix platform he built there, named ROI Engine, returned approximately $66M of EBITDA in its first production quarter across six North America brands and won the Chairman's Award, with approximately $1.8B of attributed enterprise value.
His ECC method reduced production LLM hallucination from 22.1% to 1.1% (N=2,943); the paper behind it, "Explanation Is All You Need," is under review. He holds two granted United States patents, 11,928,433 and 11,526,672, with one pending; the patented PVR system has run in production since 2018 and has delivered a 9.4x customer-response lift.
The founder's operating record extends to governed systems: WellPay, a platform built and run by governed agents, carries SOC 2 Type 1 with 100% of controls passing, and the Kerra governance system beneath it maintains an evidence chain with SHA-256 audit trails, holds the authority to halt at every moment, and extends autonomy only as performance earns it, under 832 tests at 83% coverage.
He holds a PhD in Pathology from the University of Georgia, an Executive MBA in Finance and Business Analytics from the Wharton School (WG'20), and dual BS degrees in Biology and Psychology from Virginia Tech. He spoke at Davos in 2024 and has 13 peer-reviewed publications.
Before the AI functions he built and ran clinical laboratories to CAP/CLIA standard. As a laboratory manager he stood up a GLP tissue-culture and immunology laboratory from an empty room in roughly 12 weeks and a veterinary diagnostics laboratory validated to the human clinical standard in 56 days, and at Daisy Brand he built the molecular pathology, clinical pathology, nutrition, and microbiology functions. The validation discipline the firm brings to regulated AI is the one he was trained in and ran.
Engagements begin with the four-factor diagnosis: technology, leadership, people, and process, multiplied, because the weakest factor sets the return. The work ends with the capability owned in-house. The firm operates the way it advises.