Innovative Leadership: Dakota Smith

Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, is constantly advancing, driven by our relentless pursuit of improvement and innovation. Yet, this rapid evolution can overwhelm customers, creating a gap between what AI can achieve and what we expect it to do.  

Dakota Smith embodies this drive for meaningful innovation by joining CEO Adam Zarb-Cousin, and COO John Traynor as a co-founder of Milvian Group and its Chief Innovation Officer. Like many tech visionaries, Dakota sought a place to turn his expertise into impactful solutions in a supportive environment.  

Dakota leads the Milvian Group mission to develop products that meet organizational needs. Speaking from his home office, with his young son nearby, Dakota shares his vision: “As Chief Innovation Officer of Milvian Group, my goal is to delight our customers with innovative solutions and foster a culture of creative freedom within Milvian, ensuring our customers are at the center of everything we build.”  

In 2024, about three in four CIOs plan to increase their AI budgets, while most others will maintain current spending levels. Generative AI is at the forefront of this movement, yet many businesses face challenges aligning their expectations with AI’s capabilities. Some organizations need customized models in their cloud, while others prefer out-of-the-box applications. These decisions depend on business needs, resources, time to market, and implementation costs.  

Despite the buzz around generative AI in sales, marketing, customer service, and legal sectors, only some focus on asset-intensive industries with high adoption rates in manufacturing and automotive.  

After getting his start in his family’s business where he spent his time helping repair arcade game motherboards, he enlisted in the US Marine Corps as a Cryptologic Linguist and Signals Intelligence Operator, which provided a diverse set of technological challenges to solve. After completing his time in the service, Dakota moved into cloud technology. His AI journey began with AWS, where he turned his focus to solving machine learning and big data challenges for companies building self-driving vehicles and aiming for Level 3 autonomy. Later, as Director of Solutions Architecture at an IoT and ML focused systems integrator, he played a key role in achieving AWS Generative AI competency by designing and implementing high ROI production-grade solutions for enterprises and small businesses alike.  

"A company that solves the world’s most complex challenges, stands poised to make the world’s greatest impacts.” Dakota explains. “It’s our customers that provide us with these amazing opportunities, and together we build great things. It’s my mission to ensure that our customers continuously benefit from our vast experience in building creative solutions.” 

Dakota’s accomplishments include:  

• Building an industrial data platform for a major auto manufacturer, integrating data for business insights and analytics.  

• Developing a platform for a life sciences firm to automate content fact-checking for marketing materials.  

• Automating register mapping for an energy storage manufacturer, significantly reducing onboarding time for new vendors.  

He has also migrated numerous customers to AWS, designed game server hosting solutions, and created real-time dashboards for self-driving vehicles.  

Passionate about AI, Dakota loves solving problems with disparate data sources and AI-enabled automation. He enjoys helping small businesses with AI applications, from anomaly detection to smart home technologies.  

With a new role and a talented team with decades of experience, Dakota is confident that Milvian Group, with its extensive experience in IoT and machine learning solutions, is ready to tackle any challenge. 

Connect with Dakota Smith on LinkedIn or visit our Contact page to request a meeting.