Alberto Escarlate.
Technologist · Founder · Professor

Alberto Escarlate.

Technologist, founder, and professor. I have built AI products since 2004, along with the teams behind them and the frameworks to think about both.

Co-founder and CTO at Tough Day. Adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, where I co-lead the Startup Studio.

Read my writing Speaking
Portrait of Alberto Escarlate
01 · Now

Now

Tough Day

Co-founder and CTO

I lead product and engineering at Tough Day, an AI workplace support platform that gives employees confidential help with professional challenges. My work covers agentic architecture, memory, and the practical side of putting AI to work inside companies.

Cornell Tech

Adjunct professor, Startup Studio co-lead

I am an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech and co-lead the Startup Studio, where roughly 400 graduate students a year, in about 60 teams, build and validate new ventures in a single semester.

02 · Workshops

AI strategy workshops for leadership teams.

AI changes every few weeks, and it's hard for executives to keep up with what it can do now and to set a strategy for their business. With Sam Dix, my colleague and co-lead at the Cornell Tech Startup Studio, I run AI strategy workshops for leadership teams. We start at the frontier, with the work AI can now take on and how it shifts the economics of your business. Much of that view comes from the founders we coach at the Studio.

Before each session, we select real problems from your business and build working prototypes on them. In the room, we lead the discussion so your team sees that ideas worth pursuing can be prototyped and tested quickly with AI. Your own people can build those tests, and we show leaders how to give them the time and authority to run them.

Most recently, the CEO of a global advisory firm valued at $2.3 billion brought us in for its AI leadership offsite at Cornell Tech. We now work with its business units to build and test new ways to generate revenue.

See the workshops
03 · Venture building

Venture building

We work with business-unit leaders to identify and build new products and services. Each venture runs skunkworks-style, with a small team working apart from the day-to-day business and following the method we use with founders at the Cornell Tech Startup Studio. We take each idea from the first prototype to the first customer, as a product line inside your company or as a separate venture.

How venture building works
04 · Track record

Track record

I have founded five companies and led one exit.

  • NowCo-founder and CTO, Tough Day
  • NowAdjunct professor and co-lead, Startup Studio, Cornell Tech
  • FounderFounder, CEO, Hugo Labs
  • FounderFounding CTO, Skylyte
  • FounderCo-founder, Sojo Studios (exit)
  • FounderFounding CTO, Entertainment Media Works
  • ExecCTO and Head of Product, Elektra Health
  • InvestorVenture Partner, Collaborative Fund
  • EIRTechstars and Human Ventures
05 · Teaching

Teaching

I taught in the Computer Science department at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro. I spent nine years as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, teaching entrepreneurship and innovation. Today I am an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, where I co-lead the Startup Studio for roughly 400 graduate students a year.

06 · Speaking

Keynotes on AI and work.

My talks explore how AI changes the value of expertise and the decisions people entrust to software. I use examples from working life and company building to give the audience something specific to question.

See my topics
07 · Writing

Writing

I write about the shape of agentic systems, how AI moves into companies, and lessons from building.

On Substack

Read the archive

I publish essays and field notes on applied AI, agentic systems, and building AI products. New posts land every couple of weeks.

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AI-generated portrait of a man with a mullet and leather jacket in a 1980s American arcade

Culture slop: how AI gave Brazil an American 1980s

Brazilians love a meme, and they jump on one faster than any other country. This week's meme was to ask ChatGPT to draw you as you would have looked in the 1980s, and the result is total culture slop.

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Illustration of knowledge workers standing on ground whose roots glow underneath, representing expertise

Nobel-Winning Economists Just Described the AI We're Building

Three MIT economists, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, published a Brookings paper making the case that most AI investment flows toward replacing human expertise, not expanding it. I agree with their direction and argue it should go further.

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