Scott ThompsonCSPO

Senior Product Owner, Foundational AI

• Serve as Senior Product Owner on Ascensus's Foundational AI team, owning the full product lifecycle of LLM-based product capabilities — from opportunity identification through roadmap definition, execution, launch, and continuous optimization.
• Lead design and delivery of Ascensus's first customer-facing conversational AI chatbot — a consumer-facing solution projected to serve over 1 million plan participants across the participant, sponsor, and intermediary platforms.
• Build reusable, scalable AI infrastructure and shared product patterns that other Ascensus product teams can extend, establishing the foundation for enterprise-wide AI adoption through the creation of a Center of Excellence (CoE).
• Own the product roadmap and backlog — proactively identifying and prioritizing the next-best AI capability — and translate technical AI and LLM possibilities into clear product requirements, user stories, and sprint commitments.
• Evaluate expansion opportunities including multi-modal AI (voice, documents, structured data) and agentic workflows for task orchestration and automation.
• Define measurable success metrics for AI quality and performance, design testing frameworks for LLM and agent systems, and drive continuous improvement through production feedback loops.
• Define guardrails to prevent unsafe or inappropriate AI responses and ensure all AI capabilities comply with business, regulatory, and brand-tone standards — partnering closely with Legal, Compliance, and Risk (LCR) throughout the product lifecycle.
• Serve as primary point of contact for the AI domain and supporting scrum team, articulating AI product vision and business outcomes to audiences ranging from engineers to executive leadership.
• Provide mentoring and leadership to develop less experienced Product Owners, participate in the monthly Product Owner Community of Practice (CoP), and help establish AI product-ownership best practices across the organization.

Product Owner & Lead Analyst · Conversational AI Chat Product

• Own the full product lifecycle of a production conversational AI assistant — from opportunity and roadmap through launch and continuous optimization — built on LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and semantic search over enterprise documents and structured data; successfully built and deployed the initial 0-to-1 release to production ahead of schedule, in under three months.
• Own a flagship AI product with executive-level visibility — referenced by the firm's CEO in a CNBC interview on Raymond James' AI strategy.
• Own the look and feel and end-to-end user experience of the chat product, partnering closely with UX/UI designers in Figma to turn complex backend AI into a clean, intuitive, on-brand interface advisors trust and adopt.
• Drive the product roadmap and own the backlog — proactively identifying the next best capability rather than executing a fixed plan — translating AI possibilities into prioritized requirements, user stories, and sprint commitments tied to business value.
• Define measurable success metrics for AI quality and run production feedback loops — answer-quality evaluation, user thumbs-up rates, adoption and weekly-active usage, and human-handoff deflection — to continuously improve model and product outcomes.
• Build for reuse rather than one-off delivery, defining shared UI patterns, components, and product requirements other teams can extend across the firm's platforms.
• Champion the firm's cloud-AI direction on AWS and Amazon Bedrock, aligning the roadmap with how foundational models are securely deployed, scaled, and governed.
• Ship AI responsibly in a regulated financial-services environment — authoring the user-facing legal acknowledgement Legal reviewed and signed off, setting guardrails against unsafe or off-brand responses, and partnering with Legal, Compliance, and Risk throughout.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for the AI domain, articulating product vision for audiences from engineers to executive leadership and standardizing delivery through hundreds of SOPs in a centralized wiki.

Product Manager, Project Pursuit & Delivery

• Led the transformation of legacy ERP solutions into a modern, web-first, AI-driven collaborative platform.
• Integrated cloud-based and collaborative technologies, accelerating project delivery timelines by 25%.
• Championed agile methodologies, reducing overhead by 10% through continuous-improvement practices.
• Applied local LLM/AI to surface product-enhancement opportunities and streamline feature prioritization and customer engagement.
• Standardized and automated knowledgebase SOPs and tooling using generative AI and automated workflows.

Product Owner & Product Marketing Manager

• Launched a customer-facing, generative-AI-powered knowledgebase — 125+ articles and a gamified onboarding LMS with certification (25 classes) — that reduced client contact by 30% and onboarded 250+ clients.
• Drove company valuation growth of 267% (from $6MM to $22MM) via AI-driven recommendations, 3D mapping, and IoT integrations.
• Built a robust elastic-search experience integrated with a hyper-local GPS asset-location tagging feature.
• Reduced training-development time by 50% and increased overall productivity by 50% through automation.
• Conducted 100+ user interviews to build comprehensive user journeys and adoption pathways.

Director of Product & Product Owner

• Managed 6 product lines and 30 employees from inception through implementation.
• Led AI-powered healthcare-solution development, contributing to 3 patents and a $385MM valuation.
• Built B2B white-labeled services with partners including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and Google.
• Managed contracts valued at $32MM annually, generating $2MM in annual operational savings.

Director of Content & Design, PlayOps & Special Projects

• Expanded product delivery for clients including Google Cloud and IBM, achieving ROI up to 200% and CSAT of 92%.
• Drove A/B testing that increased sales-development effectiveness by over 30%.

Worldwide Senior Advisor, Accessibility & Special Projects

• Advised Apple's worldwide teams and users on accessibility and inclusive design — helping people with vision, hearing, or mobility differences game, create art, and even earn degrees, making products work for people of all abilities.
• Served as an advisor to the Smithsonian's exhibit on accessible technology.