John De Oliveira has been working on artificial intelligence since before most of the world believed in it. He began his career as a software developer at The Bank of Bermuda, then went on to become an ontologist on the DARPA-funded Cyc project, one of the earliest and most ambitious attempts to build artificial general intelligence by encoding human commonsense knowledge. It was the start of a career-long fascination with getting machines to reason over messy, unstructured human knowledge — a thread that runs through everything he has done since.

After those early years in engineering and AI, John spent more than a decade leading product at a series of high-growth startups. He was Vice President of Product at Gro Intelligence, a data company building products that changed how the world understands agriculture, and before that led product for TrendKite and Dachis Group, both of which grew rapidly and exited successfully. More recently he served as VP of Product for Quantified.ai. Today, as AI Architect for Hapax, he has come full circle — back to being hands-on with the technology. Hapax is a proactive AI platform that learns how a business works, maps the events that drive work across an organization, and automatically builds and deploys the custom AI agents teams need — knowledge-graph reasoning over real-world business complexity, the same problem that first drew John to AI decades ago.

John led the team that published the OpenCyc commonsense knowledge base and ontology, founded Semantic Web Austin, and serves on the advisory board for Texas A&M's Master's in Analytics. He holds five patents in social analytics and in extracting knowledge from unstructured text.

Raised in a large, noisy family on Long Island, New York, John holds a B.A. in English from Le Moyne College and an MBA in Market Research from Regis University.