AI Strategy · Governance · Hands-on Delivery

Turning AI ideas into
governed systems that ship.

I'm an AI strategy and governance leader with 10+ years bridging executive priorities and technical delivery. I design the operating model, align the people who own the risk, and stay hands-on enough to prove what works.

Work with me See selected work Connect on LinkedIn

Currently running

as of 2026-07

Selected Enterprise Outcomes

The public writing shows how I think. These anonymized outcomes show the scale of work behind it: AI strategy, governance, product leadership, and operating-model change inside large organizations.

80%

Projected reduction in analyst time-to-insight

Led a governed enterprise GenAI product from use-case definition through architecture review, delivery planning, and an ROI model tied to $60M in annual revenue opportunities.

30%

Increase in first-quarter platform adoption

Led data-catalog integration, lineage, stewardship, training, and change management so the governance platform became part of how teams worked.

40%

Reduction in onboarding ramp time

Mapped fragmented enterprise processes into a reusable operating model that made delivery knowledge easier to find, teach, and apply.

Client work is summarized and anonymized. See how I approach AI governance and data strategy →

Independent Projects

I stay hands-on outside enterprise work by shipping small products, running AI infrastructure, and publishing the checks and tradeoffs behind the build.

Live App

Trip Plan Helper

Guides, templates, and tools for the person who ends up coordinating the group trip. Built around itineraries, decisions, and reducing planning chaos.

Visit tripplanhelper.com
Build Note

Party Times

A free, no-signup party game site — multiplayer Wordle, Connections, Ito and more, played from your phones. Built solo and audited with a fleet of AI agents before launch.

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Build Note

Baby Sleep Tracker

A newborn sleep-tracking app inspired by the gap between paid baby apps and the simple logging workflow I wanted at 3 a.m.

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Free Community

AI Builders Community

An ongoing community for people learning AI by building real workflows and small apps, not just collecting prompts or watching demos.

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The body of work

Three threads, each written as a dependency chain rather than a feed. The numbering is the argument: later pieces assume the earlier ones. If you only read one from a thread, read the one marked start here.

Thread 01

Governance substrate

Access control is the visible layer. These are the layers underneath and above it that decide whether it actually holds.

  1. Data classification at scale You cannot govern access to data nobody has labeled.
  2. Lineage for impact analysis Where a labeled column actually travels — and what breaks if it changes.
  3. Data contracts at the producer boundary “Breaking” only means something once you know the consumers.
  4. Data quality SLAs & observability The runtime half: did it show up on time, complete, and plausible — and who gets paged.
  5. From grants to ABAC Turning labels into access rules that survive scale.
  6. Governing AI agents' data access The same model applied to non-human identities.
  7. The semantic layer Where metric definitions live — the last mile governance usually never reaches.
  8. Where data quality actually dies What the whole chain looks like when it fails in the field.

All governance writing →

Thread 02

The local AI lab

A real multi-machine fleet running scheduled agent work. Built to test enterprise AI claims against hardware I actually control.

  1. Local LLM setup Self-hosted models on consumer hardware, and what each RAM tier buys you.
  2. Building a multi-machine fleet One box becomes five: routing work to the machine that fits it.
  3. Local LLM brain architecture Giving the fleet a memory, and a private tier that never leaves the house.
  4. AI as an operations layer Agents on cron: what survives contact with a schedule.
  5. Multi-model verification The check that makes any of the above safe to rely on.

All AI & building writing →

Thread 03

Shipping in public

Products and pipelines built solo, written up with the parts that did not work left in.

  1. Building a baby sleep tracker The 3 a.m. itch that turned into a shipped app.
  2. Building Party Times Multiplayer, no signup — audited by an agent fleet before launch.
  3. Agent goal-mode to launch-ready Handing an agent the goal instead of the steps.
  4. GA4 + BigQuery pipeline patterns The customer-intelligence plumbing under the product work.
  5. RFM with LLM-assisted analysis Deterministic SQL owns the numbers; the model only owns the language.
  6. What actually ships The enterprise version, minus the demo-day framing.

All AI & building writing →

Writing

Browse by topic: AI & Building · Data & AI Governance · Tech & Tools · Life & Travel · Book Notes

The Semantic Layer: Where Metric Definitions Should Actually Live

Two dashboards, two revenue numbers, both defensible. The metric definition is a governed asset — and in most estates it lives in the one place governance never reaches: inside the BI tool.

Data Quality SLAs: What to Promise, What to Measure, What to Page On

A contract says what a column is; an SLA says whether it showed up. The four dimensions worth promising, why detection is cheap and paging is expensive, and how to measure what the consumer actually feels.

I Ran Claude Code and Codex Head-to-Head — Then Had a Third AI Blind-Judge the Results

A real bake-off on this site's own posts: one written spec, two agent stacks, and a blind third-party judge that scored them 76-75 — a tie the process differences explain better than the number does.

How to Plan a Trip With AI (and Actually Trust the Plan)

A constraints-first system for AI trip planning: route skeletons before day-by-days, a verify step for every bookable claim, and the places AI still fails — from 34 days in Italy with a toddler.

Data Lineage for Impact Analysis: What Breaks If I Change This Column?

Contracts, classification, and access control all assume you can trace a column backward to its source and forward to what depends on it. How lineage actually gets captured, why column-level is the threshold that makes it useful, and why the graph is a lower bound.

Data Classification at Scale: How to Actually Find and Tag Sensitive Data

Access control and AI-agent governance both assume a classification layer that's accurate and current. Here's how you actually discover, tag, and maintain it — the taxonomy, the three discovery signals, and why it goes stale.

Data Contracts: Enforcing Data Quality at the Producer Boundary

Downstream data-quality tests catch damage that already happened. A data contract moves the check to the boundary the producer controls — schema, semantics, quality thresholds, and change policy, enforced and blocking.

RFM Segmentation with LLM-Assisted Analysis

Score customers on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value in SQL, then let a language model name the segments and draft the playbooks — with a hard line about which side owns the numbers.

Codex Goal Mode Took My Funnel App to Launch-Ready

I gave an autonomous coding agent one goal: make my shelved funnel-mapping app launch-ready. What it shipped, how I verified it, and where the product goes next.

AI-Assisted SEO Cleanup: From Legacy WordPress URLs to Measurable Pages

How Search Console data, 301 redirects, refreshed titles, and AI-assisted review turned an old WordPress footprint into a cleaner static-site loop.

Building Party Times: A Free Jackbox-Style Party Game Site

How I built a free, no-signup multiplayer party game site — and used a fleet of AI agents to audit it for bugs and security holes before launch.

Building a Baby Sleep Tracker with AI

Why paying for Huckleberry made me want to build a simpler tracker, and what that says about learning AI by making useful apps for your own life.

Multi-Model Verification: Catching LLM Hallucinations in Enterprise Reports

Why a single AI-drafted report can't be trusted on its own, and the adversarial, multi-model verification pattern that catches fabricated numbers before they ship.

Governing AI Agents' Data Access: Least-Privilege for Non-Humans

Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than their access-control models can absorb. A least-privilege framework for non-human identities: service identities, scoped tokens, and autonomy tiers mapped to data sensitivity.

Unity Catalog Access Control: From Grants to ABAC

Grant sprawl is a math problem — teams × roles × contractors. ABAC only fixes it if classification hygiene comes first. Practitioner notes on what changes, what doesn't, and where contextual policy is headed.

GA4 + BigQuery: Customer-Intelligence Pipeline Patterns

Turning the GA4 BigQuery export into customer intelligence — schema essentials, sessionization, identity stitching, and RFM, LTV, and cohort marts. The practitioner patterns.

Local LLM Setup 2026: Self-Hosted AI on Consumer Hardware

llama.cpp vs Ollama vs MLX, quantization tiers, hardware sizing, model roles, and how to scale from one machine to a failover fleet. The practical guide.

Local LLM Brain Architecture: From OpenClaw to Hermes

How I moved from a model-centric approach to a system architecture — routing, memory, privacy boundaries, machine roles, and the governance layer that makes it durable.

Running a Data Governance Tool RFP: How We Actually Scored TCO

How real capability scorecards get weighted before vendors ever demo, what belongs in a governance-tool TCO model beyond the license line, and how to cut a 20-vendor field to two without running 20 demos.

What Actually Broke in Month 3 of Our Data Stewardship Rollout

Org-chart steward assignments, unfunded curation work, definition debates re-fought as catalog edit wars, and the vanity metric that was lying to us — anonymized from an enterprise Alation rollout.

Your Data Dictionary Is Your RAG Governance Layer

RAG on an ungoverned data estate rediscovers stale definitions, homonym collisions, and answers with no lineage. The boring governance artifacts were retrieval infrastructure all along.

Customer MDM Intake: Where Data Quality Actually Dies

Everyone blames the MDM platform for dirty customer records — the real damage happens upstream at intake: free-text fields, invisible validation logic, and the portal redesign that actually fixed it.

AI as an Operations Layer: Agents, Cron Jobs, and Workflows

How I use agents, scheduled checks, documentation, model testing, and DataOps opportunity discovery to turn messy inputs into structured next actions.

Making YouTube Videos Faster with AI Tools and Google Veo 3

Google AI Studio for scripts, Vids for presentations, Veo 3 for B-roll, Whisk for thumbnails. A practical walkthrough of the full AI-powered YouTube production workflow.

NotebookLM Video Overviews: Google's AI Video Explainer

NotebookLM now generates full AI explainer videos from your sources. What the output actually looks like, when it's useful, and what it means for content creators.

LLMs Explained: How AI Language Models Actually Work

Tokens, RAG, hallucinations, and why private data is where enterprise AI actually gets interesting. A plain-language breakdown of how large language models work.

AI App Builders Compared: From Prompt to Product in 2025

Hands-on comparison of leading AI app builders using the same prompt. Which one actually ships a usable product in a single pass?

Building a Multi-Machine Local AI Fleet

Three machines, a custom routing layer, and 24/7 local inference. The architecture behind running your own LLM fleet on consumer hardware — no cloud APIs required.

AI in Enterprise Data Work — What Actually Ships

The gap between AI hype and AI that delivers value in enterprise environments. Patterns that work, patterns that stall, and the GTM playbook for data teams.

Using AI to Stay Productive When Life Gets Real

How I use Google AI Studio, automated outlines, and AI-assisted editing to keep shipping content with almost zero free time. The workflow that turns 20 stolen minutes into a finished draft.

Jay Samit's 'Disrupt You' — Self-Disruption as a Career Strategy

Comfort graveyards, the 5 Whys technique, and skill stacking. A framework for confronting the internal barriers that actually hold you back.

Good to Great — The Hedgehog Concept Applied to a Tech Career

Jim Collins' framework mapped to real career decisions. Confronting brutal facts, disciplined execution, and finding the intersection of strengths, passion, and economic value.

AI Video Editing for Short-Form Content

The tools and pipeline I use to turn long-form recordings into clips. AI-powered editing that handles the tedious parts so you can focus on the message.

Eudaimonia and Intentional Growth — Why Comfort Isn't the Goal

What happens when you have the stable career, the remote job, the flexibility — and realize something's still missing. Building feedback loops, creative output, and purpose outside the day job.

Big Bend National Park — A Texas Hidden Gem

Window Trail vistas, Rio Grande hot springs, and dark-sky stargazing across nearly a million acres. Notes from the drive and the trails.

34 Days in Italy With a Toddler

The real logistics of a month in Italy with a toddler. Route, gear, flights, trains, ferries, and everything I'd change.

33 Days in Japan Across 2 Trips — What Changes the Second Time

The first trip was the golden route. The second went deeper. What I'd tell first-timers vs repeat visitors.

Baby Gear Essentials for Long-Haul Travel

The baby gear that actually earned its place on a 34-day trip through Italy — what to bring, what to leave, and what to buy when you land.

Travel Tech: The Setup I Use to Work Remotely for a Month

The exact setup I used to work 34 days across Italy with a baby in tow — laptop, connectivity, power, capture, and backup.

OBS on Mac — The Complete Screen Recording & Streaming Guide

Install, audio setup with BlackHole, scene config, 1080p/4K recording settings, and how M-series MacBooks perform.

How to Separate Audio Sources in OBS on Mac

Separating mic, desktop, and game audio in OBS with BlackHole — and why separate tracks make editing so much easier.

How to Blur Faces and Objects in DaVinci Resolve

The Fusion node blur technique, step by step — works in the free version, covers tracking moving faces for privacy and compliance.

Kobe Bryant's Mamba Mentality — What Fearless Actually Means

Beyond the meme: obsessive preparation, fearlessness as a practice, and the 1% compounding thesis applied to career and growth.

Build notes — AI, data & useful software

What I’m building and learning — AI experiments, data work, apps, and the occasional trip. No fixed schedule, no fluff.

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Blendlogic Tech

MacBook Gaming & GPTK 4 Benchmarks

Real-world performance data on M5 Air, M5 Pro, and Neo. Latest: macOS 27 Beta + Game Porting Toolkit 4.0 full test.

YouTube

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Gaming benchmarks, AI tooling reviews, CrossOver tutorials, and local AI infrastructure deep dives.

AI Builders Community

Learn by Shipping

Build notes plus a free Discord for people working on local LLMs, agent workflows, and useful software.

AI Strategy

Governed AI That Ships

A practical overview of how I think about AI governance, data strategy, customer intelligence, and hands-on delivery.

About

I'm Alan Nafarrete — an AI strategy and governance leader. I help large organizations move from scattered experiments to working operating models: clear ownership, safe AI usage, trusted data, measurable value, and delivery teams that can execute.

I work as a player-coach. I can facilitate the executive and risk decisions, then get close enough to the data, architecture, and workflow to keep the strategy grounded. Outside client work, I run a local AI inference fleet, ship small products, and publish what the verification process teaches me. I also run Blendlogic Tech for real-world MacBook performance testing.

The AI Builders Community is the free, ongoing place to compare notes on local infrastructure, agent workflows, and useful software. No course funnel — just build notes and people shipping.

Focus Areas

  • AI Strategy & Operating Models
  • Responsible AI & Governance
  • Data Strategy & Customer Intelligence
  • Agentic Workflows & AI Delivery
  • Product & Transformation Leadership

Tools & Stack

  • Python, SQL, dbt
  • Google Analytics, BigQuery
  • Tableau, Power BI
  • Claude, Gemini, LLM Pipelines
  • Firebase, Cloud Run, Docker