Senior-Led, Purpose-Built Teams
Itasca Innovation is led by senior practitioners who do the work — not junior consultants learning on your dime.
Our leadership team brings decades of experience from organizations like Target, Google, Amazon Web Services, and GE, and has delivered AI enablement and transformation programs at Fortune 50 scale. For each engagement, we assemble a purpose-built team drawn from our network of specialists in AI engineering, learning design, change management, and industry-specific domains.
Leadership Team
Peter Carlson
Peter is a JD-trained strategist who spent nearly a decade at Nerdery in Minneapolis, serving as General Counsel before leading their high-level technology partnerships with companies like Google. He combines the analytical rigor of a litigator with a deep understanding of the tech ecosystem to build high-impact AI roadmaps for organizations of all sizes. Peter's superpower is his ability to foster deep-rooted relationships and align complex enterprise stakeholders around a singular, outcome-driven AI strategy.
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Melissa Murphy
Melissa focuses on the human side of technology and spent 15 years at Target, where she led the enterprise-wide adoption and change management strategy for generative AI. She specializes in helping teams identify high-impact use cases to automate complex workflows and drive measurable efficiency. Melissa's superpower is making emerging technology feel tangible and empowering for the organizations she partners with, enabling them to streamline their work and build lasting AI fluency at scale.
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Josh Dayberry
Josh is an AI engineer and solutions architect with a JD, uniquely positioning him to drive technical innovation while navigating enterprise risk. Having led cloud and generative AI initiatives at AWS and Google, he specializes in building custom, forward-thinking tools that solve complex challenges. Josh's superpower is his ability to architect scalable, high-performance systems that transform emerging technology into practical, production-ready solutions that fuel business growth.
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For each engagement, we draw on a curated network of specialists to build the right team.
AI Engineers & Developers
Custom agents, integrations, and workflow automation
Learning Designers
Curriculum development and workshop design
Change Management Leads
Adoption strategy, stakeholder alignment, and communications
Industry Specialists
Domain experts in legal, healthcare, higher education, and more
Visual Facilitators & Graphic Recorders
Live visual capture for workshops and summits
Executive Coaches
Leadership development and AI readiness for C-suite