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Kai Walker Donovan

Analytics and AI products that people use.

I design and ship internal platforms and AI tools that solve real operational problems.

Open to new opportunities
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Portrait of Kai Walker Donovan

Impact at a glance

Headline evidence recruiters can scan in seconds. Full case studies and metrics sit behind Work and Impact.

  • ~200k

    Lines shipped across BI, Python and platform code

  • 199

    People who asked the AI assistant a question

  • 79

    Recurring users of the assistant I built

Selected work

Three representative builds: an AI decision-support platform, a governed analytics tool repository, and partner-facing promotion economics.

AI decision-support platform

Internal platform

Analytics discovery platform that grew from a searchable hub to an AI diagnostic engine

199 people asked at least one question (Mar-Aug 2026)

Next.jsReactTypeScript

Team members spent hours searching across dashboards and tools to find metrics and build trust in data. Built an AI decision-support platform unifying metrics, dashboards, and operational docs in one conversational interface with row-level access control. Shipped with modular, LLM-agnostic retrieval, visualization, and answer pipelines. 199 people asked 1,838 questions; 79 recurring users across 16 job families; daily active users peaked at 73.

Central analytics tool repository

Internal platform

Governed home for analyst-built calculators and optimisers, agent-ready from day one

Single governed repo for standards, shared utilities, and agent instructions

PythonReactTypeScript

Analyst teams build valuable calculators and models every week, but most live outside the main analytics hub: spreadsheets, notebooks, one-off scripts, and small web apps with inconsistent permissions and no shared discovery. Proposed and own a central git repository where tools are built once to a shared standard, reviewed before merge, and callable by conversational analytics as well as through a UI. Proof of concept: ambient/chill SKU cap optimiser and a stakeholder demo tool, with Claude Code guided scaffolding and migration paths for legacy code.

Bulky promotion cost-to-serve analysis

Partner-facing

Measured true profitability of bulk beverage promotions after delivery and route costs

Estimated $420K impact at the largest site (7-day bulky beverage window)

SQLBigQuerySpreadsheet modelling

Commercial teams knew headline sales for bulk beverage promotions but didn't account for delivery cost per tote, driver costs, or incremental route pressure. Compared baseline and promotion weeks for water and soda across warehouse facilities, modeling delivery costs, tote fill from bulky volume, and opportunity cost. Presented methodology and findings directly to client leadership with Q&A; built reusable guardrails for future promotions. Estimated $420K impact at largest site over seven days; $560K across two sites; approximately $1M network-scale exposure.

What I do

Analytics platforms, BI and product tooling, AI-assisted workflows, and operational insight from data to decision.

Analytics platforms

Discovery hubs and governed metrics so teams find trusted answers without hunting across tools.

BI & product tooling

Roadmaps grounded in usage, navigation that reflects how operators search, and dashboards tuned with stakeholders.

AI workflows

Retrieval, routing, and guardrails so assistants cite sources and hand off cleanly to governed analytics.

Operational insight

Forecasting, cost-to-serve, and fulfilment analytics that change staffing, routing, and inventory decisions.

Proof

Analytics only lands when people trust the numbers and know what to do next. A recurring part of my work is managing stakeholders across commercial, operations, and tech, from discovery and prioritisation through readouts, adoption, and follow-up.

  • ~15-month US secondment embedded with a retail partner: daily contact with operations leadership, internal analytics, and supply chain; mentored partner analysts and ran hands-on training.
  • Direct client-facing delivery: presented promotion profitability and cost analysis decks with methodology walkthroughs, Q&A, and alignment between commercial and fulfilment leadership.
  • Partner (non-client) contexts: prioritised reporting roadmaps from real usage, walked teams through forecasts and tooling so decisions stuck, and paired narrative + visuals with operational reality.
  • Enablement at scale: trained ~100 users on self-serve analytics; shipped documentation and landing flows so discovery matched how teams actually searched for insight.
Open impact record

CV

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Let's talk

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