The Minds Behind the Method
Two principals. Four books. One method.
The Grounded Enterprise™ is a four-pillar method for enterprise AI — Technical Grounding, Financial Grounding, Grounded Infrastructure, and Grounded Execution. It was created by two people who have spent their careers on opposite ends of the same problem.
The Architect · Technical Grounding
Duane Cash
Duane Cash has spent more than twenty years building production systems that cannot afford to fail — across global banking, connected vehicles, payments, and telecom. He engineered one of the first phone-to-vehicle voice pipelines, work that led to a prominent in-car system and pioneered the context-aware, voice-first, edge-to-cloud patterns that modern generative AI now runs on. He holds nine granted U.S. patents and more than thirty filings. Today he architects agentic and retrieval-augmented systems — grounding, evaluation, knowledge graphs, governed deployment — and wrote The Grounded Enterprise to put that discipline in leaders' hands: how to build enterprise AI that actually deserves to be trusted.
- 9 U.S. patents
- Hands-free in-car infotainment
- Enterprise AI Engineering Leader
- Author, The Grounded Enterprise
- Distinguished AI Solutions Architect
The Operator · Financial Grounding & ROI
Alan Hancock
Alan Hancock has spent four decades doing what few can: reading a business problem, architecting the system, and writing the code to deliver it.
He founded and sold a telecom software company, earning a Southwestern Bell innovation award for his work on AIN/SMS infrastructure. He served as a Senior Technologist at Capgemini's Advanced Development Center. He ran the technical due diligence behind Fuego (acquired by BEA Systems, then Oracle) before becoming Oracle Consulting's first enterprise middleware architect.
Having delivered over $180M in software, Alan is the technical leader who wins the deal, staffs the team, builds the platform, and owns the outcome. He authored The AI ROI Playbook for the conversation every board must eventually have: measure AI investments honestly, defend what earns its place, and kill what doesn't. He wrote Deterministic AI Workflows for the question that comes after the model is hired: what it is allowed to own.
- Ran engagements at $1M+/month burn
- $180M+ delivered
- Oracle's first Fusion MW Solution Architect
- Southwestern Bell award — AIN/SMS Conversion, 1996
- Senior Technologist — Capgemini
- Requirements → architecture → build
- Author, The AI ROI Playbook
- Author, Deterministic AI Workflows
- BOF on internationalization, JavaOne 2001
- Founder and CTO
Published Methodology
The four pillars of The Grounded Enterprise
Four titles. One method. The Grounded Enterprise shows you how to build retrieval that deserves trust. The AI ROI Playbook shows you how to measure, defend, and kill the spend. Enterprise AI Architecture & Cloud Strategy is Grounded Infrastructure. Deterministic AI Workflows is Grounded Execution — what the model is allowed to own.
Put the method to work
Retrieval that earns trust. Spend a CFO can defend. Infrastructure you can leave. Execution the model does not own. Schedule an ROI Audit to start the discovery process.
Request an ROI Strategy Call