Jean Perez has built Valuedynamx’s data, analytics, and AI capability from the ground up, growing from the company’s first data hire during the pandemic to leading a multidisciplinary team supporting a global business. Her combination of strategic vision, delivery discipline, and practical innovation demonstrates what outstanding data and AI leadership can achieve within an SME.
Building a data and AI capability from scratch requires technical expertise. Turning it into a trusted business function capable of supporting international growth requires something more: leadership, prioritisation, and the ability to translate ambition into delivery.
Jean has done exactly that at Valuedynamx. Having joined during the pandemic as its first data hire, she has built a 12-strong function spanning data engineering, data science, AI engineering, MLOps, DevOps, analytics, and reporting.
Building Capability from the Ground Up
Jean’s achievement is significant in an SME environment, where investment decisions must be selective and teams cannot afford innovation disconnected from business value.
Her approach is to focus resources on opportunities with clear strategic relevance, create reusable capabilities (rather than one-off solutions), and establish the scalable standards.
Under Jean’s leadership, the team has expanded its responsibilities across products, markets, and regions, supporting Valuedynamx’s international operations while building greater internal ownership of data and analytics.
But the transformation is about more than team growth. Jean has created an operating model based on clear accountability, technical quality, commercial relevance, and reuse. Team members are given ownership of meaningful work while being expected to understand the business context surrounding what they build. This combination has helped data and AI evolve from a specialist capability into a trusted partner to the organisation.
“One of the strongest examples in the field of end‑to‑end data and AI leadership in a true SME environment. The entry demonstrates clarity of impact and delivery discipline.” – Judges’ comments
Turning Technical Complexity into Business Decisions
A defining feature of Jean’s leadership is her ability to connect technical possibility with practical business decisions. Senior stakeholders increasingly turn to her for complex questions, innovation ideas, and solution design. Rather than presenting AI as a series of experiments, she has worked to establish it as a disciplined business capability, with clear prioritisation, realistic delivery plans, appropriate governance, and an emphasis on scalability.
She has also introduced greater structure around the organisation’s AI roadmap, ensuring new initiatives contribute to a broader operating model rather than becoming disconnected pilots.
As one stakeholder explained: “Jean brings clarity to complexity and turns ambition into delivery. She does not just talk about change; she builds the operating model, aligns stakeholders and gets outcomes across the business.”
The stakeholder added that Jean combines “strategic vision with execution discipline”, enabling her work to land, scale, and create measurable value.
Leading with Ambition and Discipline
Jean’s leadership philosophy has been shaped by her own journey. Growing up in a low-income household in Bolivia, she earned an academic scholarship to attend private secondary school before studying Financial Engineering and Modelling at Universidad Privada Boliviana on scholarship, graduating summa cum laude. She then completed a master’s degree in Spain on scholarship and graduated summa cum laude.
That experience informs a leadership approach built around resilience, high standards, and a conviction that resource constraints do not have to constrain ambition.
At Valuedynamx, Jean has not attempted to replicate the scale or spending of a large enterprise. Instead, she has built a focused multidisciplinary function designed around what the business needs, concentrating resources where they can create the greatest value.
From one data hire during the pandemic to leading an established global capability, Jean’s progression mirrors the transformation she has driven within Valuedynamx itself.
Her achievement demonstrates a distinctive form of data and AI leadership where success is measured by the ability to build capability, earn trust, develop people, and turn strategy into sustainable business change, not by size or technology budget.
