Akbar Akbari Esfahani, MIS, is the AI & System Architect and Advanced Analytics Manager at Central California Alliance for Health, a Medi-Cal managed care plan serving 420,000 members across rural Central California. He chairs the AI Governance Committee and holds Enterprise Architect standing. Over the past three years he designed and scaled an embedded analytics function with AI as a native capability, spanning clinical operations, care management, program integrity, and member engagement, with fifty solutions now in production. His work is built on a distinction most organizations haven't yet made: dashboards are reports you visit; instruments are systems embedded at the moment of work. He builds the latter.

Before the Alliance, Akbar was Director of Data Science Innovation at LA Care Health Plan and Head of Analytics at Vital Decisions. At Highmark Health he led data science evangelism and built the foundational distributed computing infrastructure, training more than 300 staff. Earlier, at UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research, he worked on CalAIM population health and California Health Interview Survey methodology. He has taught R for Data Science and Data Mining as adjunct faculty at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College, and is published in Environmental Modelling & Software.

Akbar holds a Master of Integrated Sciences from the University of Colorado Denver and a B.S. in Mathematics. His operating conviction is simple: analytics shouldn't be where you go. It should be invisible as work gets done.