Marco PantaloneTechnical Program Manager

Anyone AI

I’ve always had a genuine interest in ML, but I’d be lying if I said I saw the rise of LLMs coming. As my kids became more independent, I decided to dive in. Lacking formal AI program management experience, I spent five months studying the landscape before joining the team at Anyone AI. It was a paradoxically familiar feeling: a completely new context again. But I had a career's worth of experience connecting the dots between technology and people. I found new team dynamics and new types of projects, but by now I could draw from all my previous roles to tackle mentorship and challenges with a confident smile. I'll let the recent testimonials speak for themselves, as my focus was simply on doing what the team needed. Now, I'm ready for the next challenge.

Ministry of Human Capital, Argentina

Parenthood and the need for more flexibility led me to 'scale back' (or so I thought) and take a fully remote position with the Ministry of Human Capital in my home country. By now, I was more seasoned, so the redefined stakes and challenges were less of a surprise. Managing long-term projects in an inherently unstable economy made budgeting and logistics a true exercise in ingenuity, requiring near-oracular levels of forecasting and risk management. Influencing principals and directors at over 20 institutions to join the initiative, all while holding no formal power, was demanding. But seeing the results of that change directly impact students was by far the most satisfying part of any program I've led. My other endeavors certainly changed lives, but here, instead of just proudly overachieving on KPIs, I got to see the human results first-hand and be thanked by the people we were helping.

Central Florida Remote Sensing Laboratory, USA

After a stint managing tech and information architecture for a software company, an opportunity took me to what I thought was a 'small' lab at UCF. Boy, was I wrong. The data was immense, and the stakes were astronomical. That 20-person lab was part of a constellation of brilliant international collaborators. That more decentralized yet still global scope brought new challenges. While I had experience in procurement, moving sensitive equipment between borders and dealing with diverse government institutions was a whole new endeavor, not only in matters of a very particular kind of red tape, but in understanding an industry that wasn't always purely driven by profit. Observing and encouraging people in their academic growth was a surprisingly contrasting dynamic compared to helping colleagues in the private sector. Most importantly, it was my first time working hand-in-hand with people from wonderfully diverse cultures and backgrounds. While I'd collaborated remotely before, I never fully grasped the depth of that diversity until I was there, dealing with their worries, sharing their needs, and, in some cases, forming friendships I'll cherish for life.

IBM Argentina

This was my first time in charge of a truly massive system—one that, I confess, I didn't fully understand at the time. The program's goal was to consolidate diverse global sites into a unified platform, something that had never been done at this scale in the field. When I arrived, and for some time after, everything felt constantly on the verge of going belly-up. It was also my first encounter with global procurement, and I saw how quickly silos formed between teams. I didn't have a name for it back then, but I instinctively worked to break them down, noticing that teams perform best when they understand each other's needs instead of 'othering' them. Something broke and I learned something new almost every day. It was so much fun.