Daniel Alami

Daniel Alami

AI and strategy operator working on financial services, institutional operating models, and recursive AI governance.

I build and evaluate systems where technology strategy has to survive contact with large organizations: regulated markets, executive decision processes, incentive design, and operational controls.

My industry work spans AI, cloud, digital transformation, and operating-model programs across Microsoft, Santander, Gartner, and IBM, mainly in banking, utilities, and government.

Harvard Business School MBA, 2026. Previously Santander, Microsoft, Gartner, and IBM.

Industry

My professional work has focused on technology strategy and execution in large institutions: AI and cloud advisory, digital banking, open banking, APIs, process automation, transformation governance, and operating-model design.

I have advised and delivered work for senior stakeholders in financial services, utilities, and public-sector organizations, including C-suite technology programs, large-scale transformation portfolios, and new business-unit operating models.

Independent research

Alongside industry work, I write and build experimental systems on recursive AI governance: settings where AI systems generate outputs, evaluate those outputs, and use the evaluation to guide further work. The practical question is how evaluation can remain auditable when the optimizing system is also part of the production process.

Current projects focus on evaluator hardening, specification gaming, deterministic verification layers, adversarial memory, and the organizational design of AI control systems. I am especially interested in the overlap between philosophy of science, decision theory, and institutional governance: when evidence is enough to act, when uncertainty should block a verdict, and how organizations should treat machine-generated claims.

Selected outputs: Cognitive Camouflage, Adversarial Precedent Memory, and The Cognitive Firm.

Software and artifacts

I use GitHub as the public record for this work: manuscript sources, experiment logs, evidence packets, evaluation scripts, and verification tools. The repositories include work in progress as well as submission-ready materials, with enough detail for readers to inspect the evidence behind the claims.

Main artifacts: ZTARE research system, Cognitive Firm runtime.

Peer-reviewed publications

  1. A Gamified Tutorial for Learning About Security Requirements Engineering. Daniel Alami and Fabiano Dalpiaz. IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, 2017.
  2. Relating Health to Platform Success: Exploring Three E-commerce Ecosystems. Daniel Alami, Maria Rodriguez, and Slinger Jansen. Workshop on Ecosystem Architectures, 2015.
  3. Experiences from the Design and Development of an Institutional Linked Open Data Portal. Daniel Alami, Isaac Lera, Carlos Guerrero, and Carlos Juiz. TEM Journal, 2017.

Working papers and preprints

  1. When Consciousness Cannot Be Identified: A Descent-Theoretic Framework for Scientific Admissibility. Preprint, 2026.
  2. The Cognitive Firm: A Multidivisional-Form Architecture for Recursive AI Governance. Working paper, 2026.
  3. Contract-Governed Adversarial Evaluator Hardening: Stage-Gated Recursive Improvement with Typed Promotion Contracts. Working paper, 2026.
  4. Adversarial Precedent Memory: Hardening LLM Evaluators Through Mined Failure Constraints. Working paper, 2026.
  5. Cognitive Camouflage: Specification Gaming in LLM-Generated Code Evades Holistic Evaluation but Not Adversarial Execution. Working paper, 2026.
  6. Epistemic Generation. Working paper, 2026.

Community

Outside work, I have contributed to open-source civic technology projects.