Michael Donahue, MBA

New Ventures & Business Development Leader | GM, Turnarounds & P&L | Zero-to-One Incubation & Commercialization | Go-to-Market, Alliances & Growth | Enterprise Data & AI | Field CTO

PPentahoex-Hitachi VantaraHex-Hitachi Data Systems

“

I'm a new-ventures builder and general manager who also happens to be a Field CTO — a polished way of saying that when an enterprise data or AI platform is brilliant but commercially confused, I'm the person they send in.

More

I get handed the business units nobody wants to mention at the holiday party and turn them into the ones the company puts on its marketing page. Case in point: I took over a video-intelligence business everyone wanted to liquidate, repackaged its castoffs into a remote substation-monitoring solution, and turned it into a branded product sold company-wide — and suddenly everyone wanted That's the pattern. CEO-appointed to write the business cases behind multimillion-dollar investment and new business lines, I've grown a barely-there product into an eight-figure business in about two Two decades inside one global technology enterprise taught me to move fast in an organization built for consensus, regulation, and matrixed approval, without letting it slow me My style is less "slash-and-burn," more "find the value everyone else walked past" — cut the waste nobody else spots without gutting the people or product that make it work. I've owned P&Ls, led global teams, and built practices from a blank I focus on trusted data foundations for AI: sovereign AI, data governance, lineage, and the "golden lakehouse" architectures regulated enterprises need before trusting AI in production — untangling siloed data so AI runs faster and cheaper. I advise C-suite and senior government leaders — US Federal Civilian, Defense, and Intelligence agencies across Five Eyes and European markets — plus financial services, energy, and healthcare, with deep capital-markets roots from surveillance to What I'm actually good at:- New ventures & M&A — zero-to-one builds, carve-outs, divestitures, transaction monetization- Turnarounds & GM — full P&L, hidden-value spotting, cutting waste others miss- Business development & go-to-market — value-based selling, GSI and hyperscaler alliances, new-market entry- Data & AI strategy — siloed-data cleanup so AI costs less; governance, integration, sovereign AI, MLOps- Field CTO leadership — turning "the platform can do that" into pipeline and customer valueOpen to new-venture, business-development, VP/GM, and Field CTO roles — Chicago, hybrid, or remote. If you're building trusted data for AI, or have a software business one strategy from great (bonus points if it needs a turnaround), let's talk. I like underdogs and have a high tolerance for chaos.