David Beatty — Fractional AI Lead
15 years at the frontier. Building things before
most companies know they need them.
2008–2013 Maximus Largest ACA rollout in the US (New York)
2013–2021 Rackspace Cloud infra + 25 new products globalized
2021–2022 Dell Managed cloud, $21M services expansion
2022–2024 Meta Horizon Worlds platform — millions of MAU
2024–now Greif AI transformation, Fortune 500
✓ Fractional AI Lead engagement — one client, full attention
✓ Advisory / scoped project engagements
✓ Taking inquiries now
$68.8M
cost leakage surfaced
60%
load time reduction at Meta
F500
enterprise environment
I build AI inside real
companies — not labs.
Enterprise AI with all the friction that implies — CISO governance, procurement gates, locked-down infrastructure, and organizational drag. I've shipped anyway.
about
I'm a product and AI leader with 15+ years driving transformation inside large enterprise organizations. I specialize in the hard version of AI adoption — not greenfield startups, but real companies with locked-down infrastructure, CISO governance, procurement timelines, and organizational friction.
I've been on the right side of every major infrastructure shift: cloud-native at Rackspace, platform scale at Meta (Horizon Worlds, millions of MAU), and now AI transformation at Greif, a Fortune 500 global manufacturer. In each case, I built before most organizations knew they needed to.
Currently Director of Product AI Transformation at Greif. Based in New Braunfels, Texas. Available for fractional engagements and advisory projects.
expertise
location New Braunfels, TX
status Available
capacity One client at a time
experience
Rackspace
2013 – 2021 · 8 years
25
new products shipped globally
Dell
2021 – 2022 · 1 year
$21M
managed services expansion
Meta
2022 – 2024 · 2 years
∞M
MAU on Horizon Worlds platform
Greif
2024 – now · F500
$68.8M
cost leakage surfaced
Director of Product AI Transformation
Greif Inc. · Columbus, OH (Remote)
// How do we close the AI gap at a Fortune 500 manufacturer — inside a locked-down enterprise — and actually ship?
Leading AI strategy, product development, and enterprise AI transformation at Greif — a global packaging manufacturer in 40+ countries. CISO-governed, Azure-based, procurement-gated. Built the company's AI capability from the ground up. Mandate: $10M in savings by building internally.
- →Designed and delivered enterprise AI platform — RAG, persistent memory, content filtering, SSO, no-code admin
- →Built plant-level cost intelligence system surfacing $68.8M in variance across 20+ plants
- →Authored Greif's first AI governance framework — negotiated through CISO and legal
- →28-slide AI strategy roadmap for ELT — 4 buckets, 41 deliverables, maturity scoring
- →2026–2027 commerce product roadmap — 9 PRDs, 6 workstreams, monthly releases
Sr. Product Manager — Horizon Worlds Platform & Cloud Gaming
Meta Platforms · Bellevue, WA
// How do we make the metaverse platform-agnostic and scale to 300M users in three years?
Drove launch of the mobile Metaverse platform for Horizon Worlds across Meta Quest, Android, iOS, and browser. Led platform development delivering best-in-class experience capable of hosting tens of millions of monthly active users.
- →Scaled from ~100k to projected millions of monthly active users
- →Load times: 50s → 20s (60% decrease). Reliability: 89% → 96%
- →Concurrent avatars per world: 30 → 1,000+. Built POC for 10k co-located users
- →20% efficiency gain through strategic GPU allocation
- →Developed LLM-powered AI agents for player experiences
Sr. Platform Manager — Managed Services Infrastructure
Dell Technologies · Austin, TX
- →Architected managed services framework — hardware allocation, device types, service tiers
- →Proposed $21M on-ramp to position Dell as a managed services company
- →Partnered with Fortune 500 companies on private managed cloud migration
Sr. Product Manager — Cloud Infrastructure Services
Rackspace · San Antonio, TX
- →Globalized and productized PS portfolio — 25 new services across AWS, Azure, GCP
- →Standard framework for regional organizations to develop new products
- →Led cloud compliance (SOC2) for Managed Public Cloud
Earlier Career
case_study
Fortune 500 · Global Manufacturing · 40+ Countries
From Zero AI Capability to Enterprise Platform in 90 Days
The Problem
A $5B global manufacturer was $20M behind budget with no visibility into why. Plant managers were flying blind — cost variances buried in a data warehouse nobody could query. The company had no AI strategy, no AI governance, and no internal capability to build one. The CISO hadn't approved an AI tool yet. The legal team hadn't reviewed AI policy. Procurement timelines ran 6+ months. The board was asking questions the executive team couldn't answer.
The Friction
Azure was locked down beyond what rapid development required. Every tool needed CISO sign-off. Legal had never reviewed an AI acceptable-use policy. Procurement required a vendor onboarding process that took longer than the first sprint. The organizational instinct was to wait for a consultant to produce a strategy deck. The mandate was to ship instead.
What Shipped
Within 90 days: a cost intelligence platform that surfaced $68.8M in cost leakage across 20+ plants — variances that were invisible in the existing data stack. Within the same window: an enterprise AI platform with RAG-based knowledge retrieval, persistent memory, content filtering, SSO, and no-code admin. And the company's first AI governance framework — acceptable use, prohibited cases, EU AI Act alignment, data classification — negotiated through CISO and legal and published company-wide.
Outcomes
$68.8M
cost variance surfaced
90 days
zero to shipped platform
$10M
savings mandate, build vs. buy
1st
company AI governance framework
Your client quote goes here. Even one sentence from a real stakeholder — a VP of Operations, a CFO, a Chief Digital Officer — does more work than four paragraphs of copy.
— Title, Company size + industry (Year)
work_with_me
I help companies close their AI gap — not with a roadmap, but with results. I've built inside real enterprise environments with all the friction that implies. Two ways to engage:
./engage --type fractional
Fractional AI Lead
$20,000 / month
I embed with your company 3–6 months as your interim Head of AI. I build the roadmap, stand up the platform, ship the first results, train your team, and hand it off. You get a transformation, not a presentation.
✓ Full AI roadmap ownership
✓ Platform selection & deployment
✓ Team capability building
✓ Governance framework
✓ One client at a time — full attention
// Best for: companies that know they're behind and need someone to own it.
./engage --type advisory
Advisory / Project
Starting at $15,000
A specific problem that needs a result. Typical engagement: 3–5 weeks. One focused deliverable you can act on immediately.
I bring the judgment and the output.
✓ Cost leakage / opportunity analysis
✓ AI platform evaluation
✓ AI strategy deck for leadership
✓ Governance framework
✓ Product roadmap & sequencing
// Best for: companies with a clear question and the data to answer it.
Ready to start a conversation?
Send an email. I respond within 24 hours. If it's a fit, we schedule a 30-minute call — no deck, no pitch, just a direct conversation about your situation.
featured_projects
project_01/
Enterprise AI Platform
Full enterprise AI platform for a Fortune 500 manufacturer — core chat, RAG knowledge retrieval, persistent memory, content filtering, SSO, no-code admin. On a locked-down Azure stack, on deadline.
project_02/
Cost Intelligence Platform
AI-powered plant-level cost analysis surfacing $68.8M in leakage across 20+ plants. Makes visible what was buried in Snowflake EDW data — delivered to plant managers and SBU leaders.
project_03/
Horizon Worlds Platform
Scaled Meta's metaverse platform from ~100k to millions of MAU. 60% load time reduction, 96% reliability, 1,000+ avatars per world. POC: 10k concurrent users in a single instance.
writing
I write about AI transformation, enterprise product leadership, and what it actually looks like to build AI inside a real company — not a startup, not a lab, but a 140-year-old manufacturer with all the organizational friction that implies.
contact
Available for fractional AI leadership and advisory projects. If your company is behind on AI and needs someone to own it — not just advise on it — reach out.