I advise leadership teams on business transformation and AI adoption — the governance, operating models, and adoption metrics that carry a strategy from slide to enterprise scale. Built over seventeen years leading these programs inside Verizon and for Fortune 500 clients.
Not frameworks on a slide. Every engagement is grounded in the same discipline used to build and run transformation functions inside a Fortune 20 company — governance that survives contact with a real organization, and metrics leadership can act on.
Governance models, communities of practice, and adoption metrics that move AI from pilot to enterprise capability — the same approach behind a $600M, next-generation AI-powered software delivery lifecycle and an $87M customer-service improvement built on real-time coaching and next-best-action models.
Zero-based budgeting, operating-model redesign, and cost & revenue transformation at scale — leading the analysis behind a $10B annual EBITDA improvement and a $413M single-year swing from budget deficit to surplus.
Standing up the councils, decision rights, and reporting cadence that let a transformation program outlast its sponsor — including the review process that redirected $350M+ in annual spend from external consulting back into internal capability.
Lean Six Sigma-driven improvement across supply chain, customer operations, and back-office functions — from cutting a pharmaceutical batch-tracking cycle from fifteen days to under a minute, to reducing patient wait times by 85%.
Let engineering teams experiment with code-assist and generative AI tooling on internal infrastructure, then routed the results that worked through an AI governance process — agents that turn product requirements into epics and user stories, feeding continuous integration and automated testing directly. Saved $600M over three years while giving developers tools they actually wanted to use.
Live sentiment analysis to guide reps mid-call, paired with an AI coach that mines call trends to recommend training and mentor pairings. $87M run-rate improvement.
Turned a $141M incoming budget deficit into a $272M surplus — a $413M swing — returning $200M to the business and reserving $75M for AI reinvestment.
Redesigned national retail staffing around a two-store team model — more flexibility for employees, more reliable payroll, and a sharper focus on customer experience. $300M annual run-rate savings.
Redesigned supply-chain traceability so a batch lookup that took fifteen days now resolves in under a minute.
Mapped the application-support value stream end to end and rebuilt it around the highest-friction points. $9M saved in year one, $180M over the five-year lifecycle.
Applied Lean Six Sigma to MRI scheduling workflows, cutting patient wait times from fourteen days to two.
Reworked the campaign review process, cutting average revision rounds from thirteen to under five and removing 15,000 hours of effort a year.
Map the current operating model, cost structure, and technology footprint against the outcomes leadership actually needs — not the outcomes a template assumes.
Build the target operating model, governance, and business case together with the teams who will own it after the engagement ends.
Stand up the councils, communities of practice, and adoption metrics that carry a pilot to enterprise scale.
Transfer ownership and reporting cadence internally, so results outlast the advisory engagement.
Avi Arora most recently served as Senior Director of Strategy & Transformation at Verizon, where he helped build the company's AI adoption governance and its Data, Analytics & AI organization — a roughly $0.9B cost base — from the ground up. Earlier at Verizon he led Business Excellence Consulting Services and managed enterprise process-innovation engagements spanning cost transformation, customer experience, and retail operations.
Before Verizon, he spent more than four years as a management consultant with BlueLine Associates, leading operational-improvement and process-transformation engagements for Fortune 100 clients across healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, and consumer products — including multi-year supply-chain and Lean Six Sigma programs for Johnson & Johnson and others.
He began his career leading Lean Six Sigma performance-improvement initiatives for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs across a regional hospital network, and earlier as a systems engineer testing enterprise network infrastructure.
Off the clock, the same instinct for process shows up in a home woodworking shop — furniture built and finished end-to-end — and at the table running a long-running tabletop role-playing campaign, which turns out to require the same planning, pacing, and stakeholder management as a transformation program.
Based in Warren, New Jersey · advisory engagements nationwide