Strategy that can't be built isn't strategy.
Value lives where intent meets what a team can actually sustain.
I turn complexity
into business transformation.
Fifteen years between Latin America, the United States and Europe. First building operations under real constraints, then redesigning how organizations work, and now thinking about the systems underneath.
Where strategy meets systems.
The problems worth solving rarely sit in one discipline. They appear where a plan meets the organization that has to carry it, and where technology meets the people expected to use it.
A plan is only as good as what the team can sustain.
Tools create cost. Behavior creates value.
Momentum outpaces the operating model sooner than expected.
Intent has to become process, data and architecture.
Selected work
- From a local operation to a regional enterpriseA single room, three countries and the region's main carriers as clients. The question was how to scale without losing speed; the answer was an operating model first. Two hundred people and more than $50M in revenue followed.
- Professionalizing complexityGrowth had outpaced structure. Business lines were separated, policies rewritten, pricing and sales operations rebuilt across four countries. Productivity rose 25% on a $12M+ portfolio. The company was later acquired by Hiberus.
- Building an AI transformation boutiqueA studio built on one conviction: the diagnostic comes before the technology. Service design, data, engineering and AI delivered end to end, now reaching more than 250,000 monthly users across six countries.
- Scaling digital learning across Latin AmericaUniversities had the platforms; students did not have the habit. Adoption was treated as a behavior problem rather than an IT rollout, reaching more than 20,000 students.
- Financial infrastructure for underserved marketsSeventy million self-employed people in Latin America without access to banks. Payments, commerce and management tools were designed for them and deployed across four countries.
Points of view
Technology adoption is a behavior problem.
A platform nobody uses is a cost, not a capability.
Most projects fail before the first line of code.
Weak analysis and unprepared data. The diagnostic is the first deliverable.
Beneath the surface
The work above rests on a deeper layer: data, architecture and infrastructure, designed as one continuous system.
Marcelo Peñaherrera
I started by building. A small operation became a regional company; a fast-growing one learned to run like an enterprise. That work taught me that most transformation problems are, underneath, systems problems.
Today I lead LAB iA as founder and CPO/CRO, an AI, data and service-design studio working in Italy, Spain, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and the US, part of NVIDIA's Inception program. Along the way I have worked with IBM, AWS and Google, and with Telefónica, DIRECTV, FOX Networks and América Móvil. Early OpenAI beta tester.
Off the clock: diver, father of two, cook.
Let's build the next system.
Open to a small number of conversations: advisory, transformation programs and AI.