MBA candidate and payments-industry strategist who builds with AI, not just about it. I research the friction, decompose the workflow, design the agent, and pressure-test it before a single real user is at risk.
How I work
The bar has moved from "can you prompt" to "can you ship product craft on top of probabilistic systems." My work shows the why behind the decisions — the trade-offs, the research, and the guardrails — not just the what.
User interviews, task analysis & BPMN, friction audits, technology landscape mapping, and synthetic-persona testing — so AI is the validated answer to a real problem, not a gimmick.
I make and document the calls between cost, speed, and accuracy — which model owns the reasoning, which layer is swappable, and where the margin lives.
Human-in-the-loop, deterministic safety guardrails, and evaluation built in from the start. I plan for the ways a system can fail in public before it does.
Selected work
Founder · Product & AI orchestration · 2026
A deployed AI agent that meets high-functioning, "successful-but-empty" professionals where they are, runs a clinically-informed discovery conversation, and surfaces the belief patterns driving their discontent. Built on Claude with a clinical-psychologist co-founder's framework, validated with synthetic personas and human testers, and engineered with deterministic safety guardrails. 4/4 patterns classified correctly · 0 false negatives on crisis signals.
Read the full case study → Case study · Deep diveFounder · Orchestrator & Payments Agent
A multi-agent AI system that gives a single owner-operator landlord the operating capacity of a full property-management company. I lead the team and own the Payments Agent — built on Claude, with Fair Housing stewardship designed in.
Read the full case study → Case study · Deep diveBuilder & Product Owner · Sales intelligence
An agentic sales-intelligence engine I built for my team at Equinox Payments — it validates genuine product-fit, scores every prospect by ecosystem leverage across the payments supply chain, and explains the why behind each score.
Read the full case study →About
I'm Calvin Riley — a sales and marketing professional in the payments industry, an MBA candidate at Northwest University, and a builder operating at the intersection of payments, technology, and applied AI. I've spent years inside the world of integrated software vendors, independent sales organizations, and payment infrastructure, and I now turn that operator's instinct toward building AI products that solve real human problems.
My approach is strategic but action-oriented: I move fast, pressure-test ideas against real-world viability, and care more about shipping something that works than about sounding impressive. The case studies here are proof of work — the messy, iterative reality of building with AI, and what I learned doing it.