Eli Rodriguez

I am the co-founder and CEO of Artisan Affiliated, an AI-native R&D firm operating in founder-led, agent-orchestrated mode. I lead the development of our hands-on client projects building and managing an interconnected architecture traversed by agents along reasoning paths. Before founding Artisan, I spent years inside the restaurant and hospitality industry, where I watched two decades of restaurant technology fail the operators it was supposed to serve. That experience shaped our core thesis: restaurants are the largest "under-AI'd" industry in America, and the operator, not the vendor, should own the intelligence that runs the business. I write and speak on AI agents, local-first software, restaurant technology, the failures of restaurant SaaS, and the emerging "data sovereignty"...