Phoenix
Long before anyone was selling AI to small businesses, Kristina Valenzuela launched a proprietary software platform to more than 2,000 hotels. It felt triumphant at the time, and it also gave her a career's worth of watching what happens when a system gets handed to people without anyone asking how those people actually work. Kristina V Co is the correction. She starts with the business and the owner, pulls out how that owner thinks and decides and sounds, and builds the AI on top of that, so what comes out still belongs to the person who built the place. Her master's in Global Management from Thunderbird trained her on how culture moves through a business, and her certifications in AI consulting and AI architecture put that to work across teams, customers, and the whole tech stack. Clean AI usage is communication with computers.
She lives in Mesa with her husband of 25 years and their four kids. Together they run a youth tackle football organization, six teams and 180-plus players, which turns out to be the same job with more detailed spreadsheets.
Her position is that AI should be participating in your business rather than taking it over for the sake of speed. She came up in interior design and appreciates all the bougie parts of life, design, hotels, very good food, fashion, etc. etc. etc.
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