Thirty-four years of building intelligent systems

Dr. Richard Kerr has built four enterprise AI functions from nothing, in four industries, over 22 years. The work runs from GLP-compliant natural language generation in 2005 to SOC 2-ready agentic SaaS in 2026, and from $2M of revenue on a $20K build to $1.8 billion on a $55M budget.

PepsiCo brought him in as Global Director of Data Science, where he created the ML Factory and led development of ROI Engine, a market-mix platform. In its first quarter in production, the platform contributed insights generating $66M of EBITDA across six brands in North America. It then scaled to 80 brands across 192 countries, covering over $70 billion in revenue, while adding $1.8 billion of accretive value and winning the Chairman’s Award and 2x Best Achievement in Media awards. The work took the organization from 3 people to more than 70 across four continents.

In April 2022, Dr. Kerr and team shipped one of the first applications of a commercial LLM, the Social Intelligence Engine, 8 months before ChatGPT. The SIE used Dr. Kerr’s patented PVR model to identify signals in social media and passed the findings to the GPT API, which wrote summaries telling influencers what was about to go viral. During the World Cup in December 2022, those viral posts took the brand to #1 on TikTok in Brazil and generated millions of dollars in earned media.

As Chief AI Officer at WellPay, Dr. Kerr directs the agentic teams that shipped WellPay Pro, an enterprise-grade, SOC 2-compliant SaaS platform at a $2M revenue run-rate with multiple enterprise clients, pre-launch. Kerra, the Agent Operating System, cut the SaaS platform’s delivery time from six months to six weeks with zero incremental engineering headcount cost, and the ECC framework cut production LLM hallucination from 22.1% to 1.1%.

Dr. Kerr advises private equity and venture capital firms on AI diligence, valuation, and feasibility. His contributions to international AI policy include the World Economic Forum in Davos (2024) and continued work with leaders around the world to deploy AI responsibly. He holds an MBA in Finance and Business Analytics from the Wharton School, a PhD in Pathology from the University of Georgia, and dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Psychology and Biology from Virginia Tech. His research elucidates the pathology and emergence of intelligence across biological, computational, and artificial systems.