I make ambitious technology mandates real inside complex organizations.
A senior leader asks for something ambitious. I find the actual problem, get the right people in the room, and build the system until it survives use. Most recently: a public company's digital and MarTech operation, from zero, across 141 countries, in a regulated fintech.
The tools keep changing. The pattern does not.
A senior leader asks for something ambitious: a platform change, an AI workflow, a new attribution model, a digital estate for a newly public company. The mandate is real, but the path is messy. The stakeholders have different incentives. The operating model does not exist yet. That is where I do my best work: find the real problem, translate across the teams that need to solve it, and build the system until it survives actual use.
It has held across three technology cycles: early virtual agent research at The Coca-Cola Company, the Webflow frontier bet at NCR Corporation, and the from-zero build at NCR Atleos. Politics taught me the operating style first: hard deadlines, high stakes, and coalitions of people who do not report to you.
Make abstract mandates real
Executive asks that are not yet defined become roadmaps, requirements, operating models, and shipped systems.
Align complex organizations
Brokering IT, Legal, Risk, Privacy, Finance, Procurement, Sales, Product, three business unit GMs, an embedded agency, and a CMO into one build.
Build systems that survive use
Adoption, governance, and measurement, not launch theater. 0% to 80% self-authoring; MQL-to-SQL up 20%; portal payments up 43%.
Built a public company's digital estate from zero
11 sites, a 15-platform MarTech stack, two rebrands, and the operating model behind them, for about $800K.
Made Webflow real inside an enterprise
Evaluation, business case, and executive recommendation, deployed by reverse proxy before custom hosting existed.
Reframed the Allpoint ATM problem
The ask said fix the app. The real problem: people search Google Maps and Apple Maps, not proprietary finders.
Repaired attribution across Marketo Engage and Salesforce
Diagnosed a structural break caused by sales workflow behavior and built the fix inside marketing-owned systems.
Got AI through enterprise governance
A corporate AI Council seat, Adobe Firefly through approval, a Copilot prompt library, and an AEO and schema program.
Built a chatbot revenue engine
A Drift chatbot live in six weeks, Salesforce-integrated for attribution.
"A one to two sentence observation about taking difficult executive technology mandates and making them real, from someone who watched it happen."
I've watched this movie before. I research the frontier, then operationalize it.
In 2017 I was publishing research on virtual agent NLU error handling at The Coca-Cola Company, patient zero for the current generation of conversational AI. Today that means hands-on builds with Claude Code, MCP servers, n8n orchestration, and local models, alongside the governance work: a corporate AI Council seat, approved tooling, and an AEO program that already has dandawson.org cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The throughline is the same as 2017: the technology is the easy part. Making it real inside an enterprise is the work.
NCR Atleos
Build a public company's digital presence from zero.
- 11 sites, 15-platform stack, 2 rebrands, about $800K
- $337M marketing-originated pipeline · 14x ROI
- 0% to 80% marketer self-authoring
NCR Corporation
Modernize the web platform; prove the Webflow frontier bet.
- Webflow Enterprise evaluation and executive recommendation
- 2023 Webflow Customer Award, Technical Achievement
- Customer Advisory Board and published Webflow case study
NCR Corporation
Own the roadmap and architecture for NCR.com and connected digital systems.
- Reverse-proxy Webflow deployment on ncr.com/restaurants
- B2B portal product ownership and chatbot revenue engine
The Coca-Cola Company
Research the frontier: virtual agents, NLU, and conversational interfaces.
- 1,000+ participant virtual agent study with AI/ML analysis
- Research across global marketing and emerging brand teams
Vernacular Labs
Independent product strategy and digital consulting.
- Platform evaluation, MarTech architecture, attribution infrastructure
- AI tooling strategy and marketing systems advisory
Politics & public affairs
Hard deadlines, high stakes, coalitions of people who do not report to you.
- The operating style behind everything since
M.S., Applied American Politics & Policy
Florida State University
B.S., Business Administration & Management
Florida State University
Webflow Layouts L1/L2
Webflow
Product & platform
- Roadmaps · requirements · platform governance
- CMS strategy · adoption planning
MarTech & revenue systems
- Marketo Engage · Salesforce · Marketo Measure
- GA4/GTM · attribution architecture · pipeline reporting
AI & emerging tech
- AI governance · AEO/schema strategy
- AI-enabled creative and translation workflows
Organizational navigation
- Executive stakeholder management · legal/risk/privacy coordination
- Vendor selection · RFPs · budget ownership