Bio

Alberto Escarlate is a technologist, founder, and professor who works at the intersection of entrepreneurship and applied AI. He has built AI products since 2004, nearly two decades before the current wave, and has worked through each generation of the technology since.

His first AI products were computer vision systems. In 2004 he was founding CTO of Entertainment Media Works, a venture-backed shoppable media company, where that work led to a 2006 patent filing on interactive video. He later completed Udacity's deep learning and self-driving car programs. At Skylyte his team built machine learning models that measured workplace burnout from voice and other signals. Today he builds LLM-based agents at Tough Day. Two decades of that work give him a practical sense of what each generation of AI promised and what it delivered inside companies.

He is an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, where he co-leads the Startup Studio. Roughly 400 graduate students a year, working in about 60 teams, form, build, and validate new ventures in a single semester. The program compresses the founder's method into a repeatable curriculum, and Alberto has run it for four years. Before Cornell Tech he spent nine years as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he taught entrepreneurship, and taught in the Computer Science department at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro.

He is co-founder and CTO of Tough Day, an AI workplace support platform that gives employees confidential help with professional challenges. He leads the product and engineering teams and owns the architecture, an LLM-based system with agentic workflows and multi-layer memory that runs in production at enterprise customers. Much of his work there is the practical side of putting AI to work inside a company: data governance, privacy, security review, and the change management that gets employees to use what was built.

Alberto has founded five companies and led one exit. He was co-founder of Sojo Studios, a social impact gaming company acquired by Zynga. He was founding CTO of Skylyte, founder and CEO of Hugo Labs, which built connected transportation for school systems, and CTO and Head of Product at Elektra Health.

He spent three years as a Venture Partner at Collaborative Fund, where he evaluated hundreds of technology companies for investment and advised portfolio companies. He was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Techstars and Human Ventures, has mentored founders at Techstars New York since 2014, and has advised organizations in healthcare, AI tooling, and the public sector as a fractional CTO.

He delivers keynotes and workshops on applied AI, agentic systems, entrepreneurship, and how technology changes work, in English and Portuguese, for companies, conferences, and universities across the US, Brazil, and Latin America.

He earned a BS in Computer Science from PUC-Rio and an M.Sc in Systems Engineering and Computer Science from COPPE-UFRJ. Brazilian-American, he lives in Westport, Connecticut, and works from New York.

Alberto Escarlate is a technologist, founder, and professor who works at the intersection of entrepreneurship and applied AI. He has built AI products since 2004, starting with computer vision for shoppable video and continuing today as co-founder and CTO of Tough Day, an AI workplace support platform built on agentic systems. He is an adjunct professor at Cornell Tech, where he co-leads the Startup Studio and roughly 400 graduate students a year build and validate new ventures in a single semester, and he spent nine years teaching entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design. He has founded five companies and led one exit. He delivers keynotes and workshops on applied AI and entrepreneurship in English and Portuguese. Brazilian-American, he lives in Westport, Connecticut, and works from New York.