Bio

I'm Pia. A human, first. Kid wrangler, holding down the family a close second. By day, a product strategist and AI practitioner, based outside of Chicago. I've spent the last 20 years building products at the intersection of AI, data, and human behavior — from one of the first natural language generation systems to IoT infrastructure to healthcare personalization engines. I taught the inaugural technical product management for AI course at Northwestern's MBAi program, which means I spend a lot of time watching smart people discover that the hard part of AI isn't the technology (it's people).

Now

Currently, Head of Client Service Delivery and Solutions Innovation within DLA Piper's AI Practice. At the intersection of AI and law — improving matter outcomes, navigating copyright and IP for AI products, and delivering investor-focused legal solutions through validated legal data intelligence from unstructured documents at scale.

See: PiperAI at United Nations AI for Good in 2025.

8th Light (2022–2025)

Head of Product and AI. Leading product practice across software consultancy engagements — patterning strategy, building AI product capabilities, and helping organizations close the gap between what they say they want from AI and what they're actually building.

Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering

Technical Product Management in AI, Adjunct Lecturer. It was the inaugural MBAi program which is a joint venture between McCormick School of Engineering and Kellogg School of Management.

Evive, now bswift

VP of Product, US. Building the personalized engagement engine that closes gaps in benefits utilization — connecting the right person to the right resource at the right time through predictive analytics and behavioral science.

Hologram Inc.

VP of Product. Global cellular platform for IoT — 196 countries, 550 carriers. This is where I learned what it means to build infrastructure that has to work even when nothing else does. Physical resilience as a product constraint. Some of my favorite customers were organizations doing work I still think about: Paso Pacifico embedding fake sea turtle eggs with cellular sensors to track poachers; a team at Cardiff Met building a Raspberry Pi + Hologram Nova automated crop care system from scratch.

Narrative Science, now Salesforce Tableau

Director of Technical Product Management for Platform and UX. Contributed to the patent family on automatic narrative generation from data using communication goals serving enterprises in the Fortune 1000 and Big 5 Consulting.

Relativity (formerly kCura)

Analytics Product Manager. I led the team integrating Content Analyst's email threading engine into kCura's e-Discovery platform, Relativity.

Mattersight, now NICE

Analytics and early product work. I built predictive fraud detection models for the Center for Medicare — using text extracted from transcribed call center audio that had been degraded in conversion from speech to text. The transcription quality was poor; the language was nonstandard; the only parsing tool available was RegEx. This was the pre-NLP era of a problem that NLP would later make tractable. The combination — messy text, hand-crafted extraction logic, behavioral modeling from language — turns out to be the exact problem I spent the next decade approaching from different angles.

Behavioral Research Associates

My first job, held part-time while finishing my senior year at DePaul — I managed to wrangle course credit for it, which is the only reason the hours were survivable. Behavioral Research Associates was an applied behavioral economics firm in Evanston specializing in consumer financial decision-making. I analyzed EBRI research on retirement savings behavior and examined how the framing of financial institution prospectuses affected what different populations actually did with their retirement funds. In retrospect: an early foray into language analysis.

DePaul University

BA in Psychology, minor in Computer Science and Data Mining. The combination that explains everything: I think about systems the way a psychologist thinks about behavior — as observable, contextual, and always mediated by the gap between the map and the territory.

I conducted undergraduate research in the Visual Informatics and Data Analytics (VIDA) Group's MedIX Laboratory under Daniela Raicu and Jacob Furst. Two projects: one on housing risk assessment — using data mining to build predictive models for where gentrification pressure would require affordable rental housing intervention, focused on neighborhoods like Pilsen at a moment when that question was just becoming urgent (~2006). The other on medical imaging, mapping lung nodule terminology across radiological lexicons to reduce diagnostic variability — which led to a peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Digital Imaging and a presentation at Radiological Society of North America (RSNA 2008).

Values

I describe my ideal civilization in terms of what it enables rather than what it prevents.

A good society is one where people can build things that matter to them, in genuine relationship with other people who are building things that matter to them, with enough shared infrastructure that no one has to reinvent the basics alone. That means education, healthcare, and access to tools should be as close to universal as we can get them. It means the goal of governance is to maximize the conditions for human flourishing, not to optimize for any particular version of what flourishing looks like.

I'm suspicious of systems that concentrate decision-making — whether in governments, platforms, or AI architectures. Not because centralization is always wrong (sometimes it's just efficient), but because the people who benefit from centralized decision-making have strong incentives to make it feel inevitable. It isn't.

I believe in local infrastructure. Not as a rejection of global systems, but as a hedge against their fragility. The homestead is partly this: an experiment in what it feels like to have real options, to not be entirely dependent on supply chains you can't see or systems you can't influence.

What I enjoy

enviralogic · Glass Garden - Grey Noise

Science fiction. Specifically the kind that takes seriously the question of what happens when systems get smart enough to have opinions. Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez. Andy Weir. Ursula K. LeGuin. Orson Scott Card. Anything that thinks carefully about how information architecture shapes behavior. I re-read things that aged well and try to figure out what the author knew that I didn't.

I mentor product people, particularly on the gap between strategic frameworks and the actual experience of building. The frameworks are useful though the best learning is by doing - watching creativity happen across people, systems, and software.

Projects

The Glass Garden — A browser game that teaches RAG, reinforcement learning, and agentic orchestration through narrative play. Three endings. Every mechanic is an argument.
Homestead Agentic Web — The distributed two-node system my partner and I built for our five-year self-sufficiency project.
Essay series on intentional AI — ongoing.
(formerly) Northwestern MBAi curriculum — teaching product strategy in an AI context.

Patents: Automatic generation of narratives from data using communication goals and narrative analytics — US9576009B1 and family

Some code I wrote before February 2020 is physically sealed inside a mountain in Svalbard, Norway — archived in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault alongside a human-readable decoding guide intended for whoever finds it next. The program's stated timeline is 1,000 years. I find this either deeply meaningful or completely absurd, depending on the day.

Contact

I love hearing from people who are building things. Especially people who are working on the gap between strategic knowledge and embodied understanding, which is most of the interesting problems.

Last updated March 2026