SpencerTarkoff.

I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Orinda, California. I’m a Bay Area kid with a mom (Janet) who’s as fanatical about AI as I am, a dad (Ken) with whom I’ve watched every Warriors/Niners/Giants game, and a sister (Claire) who’s such an extrovert she makes me look quiet.

I went to UW–Madison and majored in finance. I also liked that the school took sports seriously (even if our football results the last few years don’t quite make the grade). I briefly thought about working in sports and for three years, co-hosted a weekly NFL talk show on WSUM 91.7. Our main listeners were my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my friends’ little cousins.

After college, I worked as an AI consultant at Private Health Management. This was in summer 2025, pre Claude Code and Codex. PHM had issues monitoring the quality of patient-clinician calls which was causing business disruptions. I built an AI agent to identify problem interactions sooner and provide more time for mitigation.

I had no engineering background. I taught myself ChatGPT, ran stakeholder interviews with the clinical team, and figured it out by building. I hit the instruction character limit on custom GPTs quickly and worked around it by offloading context into JSON files the agent could reference. The tool, Communications Coach, shipped and is still running in PHM’s operations.

I am a consultant at Protiviti, currently embedded with a Fortune 500 hospitality tech client, building a business process improvement agent that guides employees through a five-stage framework and generates deliverables along the way. I am building it mostly with Claude and Claude Code. In addition, I help lead Protiviti’s AI training programs, making 45-minute to two-hour presentations to groups inside the firm, at client companies, and at external CFO and senior management forums.

I think I am really good at sitting with people to understand their workflow, figure out what they need, and then using AI to build the tools to address their needs. AI tools have gotten so powerful that coding itself does not seem to be the most critical skill in which to acquire proficiency. Rather, the most important factor is understanding the business needs and what the product should do and be.

Outside of work and school, I spent ten years playing competitive water polo on a national level, six years coaching swimming and water polo for a Special Olympics team, enjoy pickup basketball when Chicago cooperates, and go for runs on the lakefront when the weather is nice. I love to travel and have been to over 50 countries. My family dog is Dorothy and my sister’s two kittens (of which my parents now have temporary physical custody as she lives in a small flat in S.F.) are Callie and Willow.

Thank you for visiting my website. Please be sure to try the “Talk to Spencer” agent if you would like me to answer any other questions.