Intelligence by Design

AI Product Leader / Lagos · London · Remote

AI products that ship, scale, and answer to the P&L.

Six-plus years turning machine-learning research into revenue-bearing products for enterprises, from first model to board-level outcomes.

Book a conversation See selected work ↓
6+ yrs
Leading AI product from strategy to scale
7
AI products shipped to production
$40M+
Measured business impact delivered
30+
Engineers, scientists & designers led
01Selected Work

Context

A top-5 insurer was drowning in claims backlog, with adjusters spending most of their day routing rather than deciding.

Role

Led product end-to-end: business case, eval framework, human-in-the-loop design, and phased rollout across three claim lines.

Result

68% faster processing, 12-pt CSAT lift, and a regulator-ready audit trail adopted as the company standard.

Context

Legacy rules-based underwriting was mispricing risk and losing profitable segments to digital-first competitors.

Role

Owned model productization, explainability requirements, and the regulatory approval pathway across three markets.

Result

+22 pts accuracy, approval in all three jurisdictions, and a 9% improvement in loss ratio within the first year.

Context

A leading bank needed to serve customers in four languages without quadrupling its support organization.

Role

Defined the containment-vs-handoff strategy, multilingual eval suite, and the growth loop from USSD to app.

Result

2.4M MAU, 71% containment rate, and support cost per interaction down 55%.

Context

Manual KYC review was the single largest bottleneck in onboarding, stretching account opening to eleven days.

Role

Shaped the platform play: one extraction pipeline serving nine internal teams, with confidence-based routing to humans.

Result

80% straight-through processing, onboarding cut to same-day, 40,000 analyst-hours redeployed annually.

Context

A regional retail group was losing sales to stock-outs while simultaneously over-holding slow inventory.

Role

Ran the pilot-to-platform transition: forecast UX for non-technical planners, override telemetry, and the scale playbook.

Result

31% fewer stock-outs, 18% less excess inventory, live in 1,200 stores in nine months.

Context

Clinician burnout was driven by documentation load, with hours of note-writing after every shift.

Role

Took the product 0→1: clinical safety review process, physician champion program, and the pilot design across 12 hospitals.

Result

90 minutes returned per clinician per shift, 94% note-acceptance rate, expansion approved system-wide.

Context

Fraud rings were exploiting gaps between siloed rule engines across payment channels.

Role

Defined the graph-based detection product, false-positive budget with the risk team, and the real-time serving requirements.

Result

$14M fraud blocked in year one with false positives held under 0.8%, below the agreed customer-friction budget.

A working belief

The hard part of AI was never the model. It's earning the trust to put it in front of a customer.

02How I Work
№ 1

Business case before build

Every model I ship starts as a P&L line, not a demo. I write the value hypothesis first: what changes, for whom, measured how. Projects that can't answer it get killed. It's why my products survive budget season.

№ 2

Evals are a product surface

I treat evaluation the way great teams treat design: continuously, visibly, and owned. Regulators, executives, and users all trust a system they can see being measured, so I make the measurement part of the product.

№ 3

Ship thin, learn fast, scale what's true

I put a narrow slice in front of real users early, instrument everything, and scale only what the data defends. Six years in, the pattern holds: the fastest route to a big AI product is a small honest one.

03About
Intelligence by Design: exploring AI, product strategy and the philosophy of intelligent systems.

TemiTope Kasali builds AI products that survive contact with the real world: regulators, unit economics, and users included.

Over six-plus years she has led product for machine-learning systems across insurance, banking, retail, and healthcare, taking seven products from first hypothesis to production scale. Her work has processed millions of customer interactions, cleared regulatory review in multiple markets, and delivered more than $40M in measured business impact.

She is known for translating between boardrooms and model teams: sharp on the economics, fluent in the technology, and unwilling to ship anything she can't measure. Executives bring her in when an AI initiative has to actually work.

Currently
Leading AI product for enterprise platforms
Focus
LLM products · Applied ML · AI governance & evals
Open to
Advisory, speaking, and select leadership roles
04What Leaders Say
“Temi is the rare product leader who can defend a model architecture in the morning and a business case to the board in the afternoon. We stopped debating AI strategy and started shipping it.”
Chief Data Officer Top-5 insurance group
“She turned our most politically stuck initiative into the company's reference case for AI. Twice.”
Chief Executive Officer Pan-African financial services group
05Contact

If you're weighing an AI initiative that has to deliver rather than demo, the conversation is worth an hour.

hello@temitopekasali.com
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