JC Bonilla
JC Bonilla
About
Detail
Chief Operating Officer and Head of AI
New York, United States
I build things at the intersection of AI, data, and human potential, and I have spent twenty years doing it in environments where the stakes are real and someone has to be accountable for what it actually produces.
I am currently COO and Head of AI at Element451, a PE-backed student engagement platform serving 450+ universities. My mandate is the full enterprise transformation of the company into an AI-native organization. I own the company-wide AI roadmap, the governance frameworks that determine which initiatives get funded, the adoption playbooks that move capabilities from experimentation into production, and the business outcomes that result. I am directly accountable to the CEO and PE sponsor for ARR growth, retention, and operational leverage at scale. I joined when the company was worth $3M, helped build the AI foundation that drove it through product-market fit and a PE raise, and sit on the Board of Directors today.
Before Element451 I was the inaugural Global Chief Analytics Officer at VaynerX, building a practice from zero to 84 people and $13M in revenue in under three years. Before that I led applied data science at DataKind across 200+ social impact projects in global health, economic mobility, and humanitarian response, managing a 900+ person global volunteer community.
I am a faculty member at NYU, teaching Applied Data Science at the graduate level for over a decade and mentoring more than 1,500 students now leading AI initiatives worldwide.
I co-host the Higher Intelligence podcast with Enrollify, speak at conferences globally, and work daily at the frontier of agentic AI in higher education, building, deploying, and being accountable for what it actually does in the real world.
Ph.D. in Information Systems and Applied Data Science, NYU. M.S. in Electrical and Financial Engineering. B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Bilingual in English and Spanish. Global experience across EMEA, APAC, LATAM, and the United States.
What drives all of it is the same: making sure powerful technology translates into real outcomes for the people and institutions that need it most, and being personally accountable when it does not.
I am currently COO and Head of AI at Element451, a PE-backed student engagement platform serving 450+ universities. My mandate is the full enterprise transformation of the company into an AI-native organization. I own the company-wide AI roadmap, the governance frameworks that determine which initiatives get funded, the adoption playbooks that move capabilities from experimentation into production, and the business outcomes that result. I am directly accountable to the CEO and PE sponsor for ARR growth, retention, and operational leverage at scale. I joined when the company was worth $3M, helped build the AI foundation that drove it through product-market fit and a PE raise, and sit on the Board of Directors today.
Before Element451 I was the inaugural Global Chief Analytics Officer at VaynerX, building a practice from zero to 84 people and $13M in revenue in under three years. Before that I led applied data science at DataKind across 200+ social impact projects in global health, economic mobility, and humanitarian response, managing a 900+ person global volunteer community.
I am a faculty member at NYU, teaching Applied Data Science at the graduate level for over a decade and mentoring more than 1,500 students now leading AI initiatives worldwide.
I co-host the Higher Intelligence podcast with Enrollify, speak at conferences globally, and work daily at the frontier of agentic AI in higher education, building, deploying, and being accountable for what it actually does in the real world.
Ph.D. in Information Systems and Applied Data Science, NYU. M.S. in Electrical and Financial Engineering. B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Bilingual in English and Spanish. Global experience across EMEA, APAC, LATAM, and the United States.
What drives all of it is the same: making sure powerful technology translates into real outcomes for the people and institutions that need it most, and being personally accountable when it does not.
