The classroom
Professor of the Practice
ITAM — with teaching at CDTM/TUM in Munich, workshops at LBS and LSE, and courses at Nebius Academy.
The human behind the classroom
Organizations are becoming programmable.
I am Rod Rivera. I build and study organizations where one human directs a workforce of AI agents — and I teach the discipline of running them well.
Professor, researcher, founder and production machine-learning practitioner. The characters arrive later. The operating experience comes first.
Rod Rivera
Researcher-operator · London
The research question
What happens to the firm when intelligence becomes programmable?
I call the practical experiment a Zero-Employee Organization: an organization designed so that headcount stops being the unit of scale.
Zero-employee is like serverless — there are humans, just as there are servers. What approaches zero is headcount as the price of growth. The point is leverage for the small, not headcount reduction for the large.
Field notes, not mythology
The receipts behind the lessons
This is not a conversion story from last year. It is one line of work, tested across classrooms, companies and continents.
The machinery
15+ years in production AI
Alibaba Cloud, Huawei, Samsung, Philip Morris International and Rasa.
The research
PhD · 20+ publications
Machine learning research across IEEE, SIGKDD and other peer-reviewed venues.
The founder's scar
Built and sold Emplido
A company, an acquisition and the long education that comes after the announcement.
The range
Five languages
Mexican-German, shaped by work across Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The present experiment
A working agent organization
Written roles, verification gates, failure ledgers and one accountable human.
One program, several rooms
A universe with one research question
These are not unrelated projects. Each room tests a different part of how humans build, govern and learn to work with digital employees.
The operators' room
Zero Employee Organizations
A separate community for organizational practice and research. Zero Employee owns organization-level diagnosis, redesign and implementation.
The builders' room
AI Product Engineer
The career discipline for people building — and becoming — the digital workforce.
The workshop
Open Source
Every public repository behind the courses on this site — real, runnable, and free to clone.
The classroom
Prof Rod
Articles, notes, courses and characters that make the operating discipline teachable.
Meet the teaching tamagotchis
Rod operates the laboratory. They make it teachable.
Every difficult idea gets three passes: explained carefully, built literally and questioned without ceremony.
Prof Rod
The teaching avatar
Slows the idea down, draws the architecture and shows the working.
Mator
The builder — visiting
Builds exactly what was specified. This is how the specification meets reality.
Quackster
The alchemist — visiting
Pokes the confident answer until the honest answer falls out.
They are companions to the teaching, not substitutes for the person accountable for it.
The laboratory is live
This site is built by the thing it teaches.
A layered agent workforce drafts, builds and checks the work. Written roles govern it. Deterministic gates stop it. A human judges every render before it ships.
The rule is simple: receipts over narrative. The classroom gets the real operating record — including the failures.
Class is in session
Start with the work, not the biography.
Read the long-form lessons, inspect the working notes or take a course. The universe makes more sense once something is moving inside it.
