James Penz

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James Penz

AI Operating Partner · Value Creation · Commercial Diligence

I size the EBITDA impact, design the strategy, and build the AI systems that deliver it. One person, all three. $500M+ sized, $30M+ realized, and a production multi-agent system running four businesses.

Value creation · Commercial due diligence · AI strategy & agentic systems · Operating model design · P&L leadership

james@clearforge.ai
jamespenz.com · linkedin.com/in/jamespenz
Detroit
2025–

ClearForge.AI

Founder & CEO. AI deployment, mid-market & enterprise

  • · Built the go-to-market engine at a $4B industrial manufacturing company: market scan to 358 qualified targets, 5 new segments, 119 account playbooks across 9 lanes, 60% prospecting-time reduction, refreshed on a fully automated weekly cycle.
  • · Architected AgentForge solo: 35,000-line production multi-agent OS. 20 agents, 11-tier model router across six providers, Langfuse eval and cost tracing, running four business units unattended.
  • · Built a weekly commercial engine at the same client: automated market scan with a fact-check gate and finished, client-ready sales decks delivered every Monday morning with zero analyst hours.
  • · Run agentic governance as the owner: per-agent budgets, heartbeats, evaluation gates, and kill criteria; cost per run traced next to quality so spend is a report, not an opinion.
  • · Shipped public work samples on my own infrastructure: a first-90-days proposal agent and an AI-readiness diagnostic, SSRF-safe and rate-limited, live at jamespenz.com.
2023–

Paradosi Partners

Co-founder & CEO, search fund, lower-middle-market industrial

  • · Family-office backed with committed capital; built the origination, underwriting, and diligence systems end to end.
  • · Built the origination engine end to end: 18 industry theses, 157,000+ companies ranked by a buy-fit model, 14,000+ owners contacted, 1,000+ underwritten, 25 CIMs into diligence, 3 LOIs signed in direct-to-owner negotiations (68-slide institutional investment memorandum on the lead deal).
  • · Led buy-side diligence on the lead acquisition: CIM deconstruction, three validation gates before any number reached the model, explicit kill-switch criteria, and a 68-slide institutional investment memorandum with open gaps flagged rather than papered over.
  • · Built a 17-tab formula-native LBO model engine: three-statement linkage, DCF, seller-note and real-estate treatment, sensitivity tables, the models an investment committee interrogates.
  • · Owner-direct outreach system built from scratch: warmed sending domains, AI owner-name enrichment at a ~90% hit rate, and a dialer that prioritizes owner cell lines.
2019–23

Bain & Company

Generalist Senior Manager; recruited as first working member to launch and build the Vector AI Automation practice

  • · Recruited to launch the Vector AI Automation practice as its first working member; built it while running full generalist cases, teams of 10, main client contact. 19 Fortune-100-scale engagements, 8 industries; $500M+ quantified P&L impact.
  • · Delivered $20M in realized savings as half of a two-person team embedded with the CEO; retained six months to train the operating team and hand over the cadence.
  • · ~$10M margin delivered in-year at an OTC consumer-health manufacturer; forecast error 47%→39% realized; $29–70M simplification recommendations.
  • · Led materials-management recovery at a $4B equipment manufacturer: sized up to $210M gross margin, $90M actioned year one, validated with nineteen client operators across five plants.
  • · Built the board-level automation program at a global technology OEM: five C-suite-sponsored charters, $150–200M two-year target, self-funding first wave.
  • · Authored the automation operating model a top-5 U.S. health insurer still runs on; 75% cycle-time reduction across three engagements.
  • · Portfolio finance playbook deployed with 8 CFOs of a multi-billion-dollar fund; 2023 GenAI strategy for a global aerospace OEM.
  • · Ran a 4,056-respondent conjoint study and a SKU-complexity regression to price portfolio simplification at an OTC consumer-health manufacturer.
  • · Ran the transformation delivery office for one of the decade's largest aerospace turnarounds: initiative pipeline, stage-gate governance, value-capture reporting.
  • · Zero-based cost transformation at a national retailer: owned the cost baseline and category workplans across ten months in the pandemic's hardest retail year.
  • · Built analytic safety-stock targets worth $36M buffering up to 70% of shortages; triaged 5,200+ exception orders; modeled 29,000+ SKUs.
  • · Designed the support-functions operating model for an international healthcare provider: spans and layers, shared-services scope, migration path.
2016–19

EY

Performance Improvement. AI & automation

  • · Designed, built, and deployed 7 AI-enabled processes to Azure production at a $4B manufacturer. 40% FTE-capacity lift, $4M recovered revenue.
2013–16

Capgemini

Financial-services technology transformation

  • · Four end-to-end platform implementations for Fortune 500 insurers, $500M+ annual premium volume.

Education & credentials

  • Michigan State University · BA Economics
  • MIT Sloan · AI executive education
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Notes

Clients blinded per confidentiality; realized vs sized always labeled. References available on request. Full interactive record at jamespenz.com.