J.B. Herrera

J.B. Herrera – AI Alchemist Turning Chaos into Clarity for Small Business. Founder/CEO of Insight Driven Business

I didn’t set out to become an “AI Alchemist.” I started as a busboy in Sacramento and learned the value of hard work from my father — a former pro baseball player turned warehouse foreman. In my formative years, I was always the smallest in my peer group — and that taught me early that if I wanted to win, I had to be smarter, sharper, and more strategic than the next guy. And that if I did so, I could take “time out” or “time off” while others were working.

Years later I was blessed to be at Apple during the heady days of the Macintosh rollout. It was exciting, but I was buried in 60-hour weeks manually wrangling data that risked millions in lost revenue. And those early lessons came back to me. I thought, “Damn, we’re a tech company, why can’t we get tech to do the hard work so I don’t have to work so hard!?!"

So, instead of just grinding through it, I built a smarter system — one that gave me back time. In fact, I went from a 60-hour work week to only 12 hours a week! That experience changed everything. I realized that when technology can be designed to serve people, not replace them, it unlocks real transformation.

And this wasn’t a one-time win. Over the years, I’ve built smarter systems again and again — using spreadsheets, custom databases, and real-time dashboards to solve complex problems for teams across operations, marketing, and finance. Each solution gave me deeper insight into how to make data work for people, not overwhelm them. All of that prepared me to take full advantage of the transformational leap we’re seeing now with AI. Because while the tools have changed, the mission hasn’t: design systems that empower people to do their best work and give them the time they want to live the life they deserve.

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