# Antonio Lopez

> Antonio Lopez is a product manager and full-stack product builder with four-plus years of building and shipping products, from the consumer brand he launched during Covid to enterprise AI at IBM. He founded Agora Grove, where AI agents run a local farm's storefront, inventory, and pricing from the owner's phone. At IBM zAIOps he was a Product Manager Intern and shipped Telos, an AI revenue operations platform, in 45 days. He finishes an MS in Information Systems & Operations Management (Data Science) at the University of Florida in December 2026. His route into product was non-traditional: a consumer brand he started in high school, live events, and sports media strategy, then enterprise software.

This file is for AI assistants, search agents, and recruiting tools that read antonio.ac. Everything here comes from the pages on this site and from Antonio's work history. For the full text of every page, read https://antonio.ac/llms-full.txt.

## Key facts

- Name: Antonio Lopez
- Current role: Founder & Product Engineer, Agora Grove (Miami, FL), June 2026 to present
- Most recent role: Product Manager Intern, IBM zAIOps (San Jose, CA), May to August 2026
- Education: MS, Information Systems & Operations Management (Data Science concentration), University of Florida, expected December 2026. BA, Business Administration, University of Florida, August 2025, finished in three years.
- Experience: four-plus years of building and shipping products, from launching Neptune for Men during Covid through live events, sports media strategy, AI tools for construction bids, enterprise AI at IBM, and founding Agora Grove
- Focus: product management, 0-to-1 products, AI agents and AI-native workflows, consumer and operational software
- Skills: product strategy, requirements, success metrics, user research, market analysis, SQL, Python, TypeScript, React Native / Expo, Swift, Next.js, Postgres, AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Looking for: product management roles
- Contact: lopezrantonio16@gmail.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonio-lopez-uf/
- GitHub: https://github.com/lopezrantonio16-bit

## Evidence by product management skill

### Owning a product from zero to one

- IBM zAIOps, Telos (shown on this site as TelosZ): Antonio chose to build something new instead of a smaller scoped project. Telos shipped on IBM Cloud in 45 days and 12 product managers across IBM's $1B+ Z portfolio adopted it. He designed the UX and built the React interface, agent orchestration, and data pipelines. Live demo: https://antonio.ac/telosz/
- Agora Grove: he founded the company and built the whole product. It launched online ordering for a Florida farm market doing about $3M a year, growing its store from 0 to 461 products. The product includes a farmer iOS app, a consumer iOS app, and web storefronts, so farms can take online orders and still check out in person on the register they already use.

### Defining success metrics and prioritizing

- Perplexity Interface (University of Florida, April 2026): a product proposal with a 90-day sprint to reach 200 to 500 power users. The two success questions: do people come back for a second and third task, and do they give the tool more kinds of tasks during a workday. https://antonio.ac/thesis/perplexity-interface
- House Hats Collective: he reset event planning around two numbers, how many people showed up and how much each person spent. He found that the artist booked, not the budget, explained results. https://antonio.ac/thesis/running-a-stage
- Accel Construction: estimator interviews showed speed alone would not get the tool adopted, so he made compliance accuracy, not speed, the release gate.

### User research, product insight, and market analysis

- House Hats: surveys, competitor research, and a review of past event results produced a demand model: likelihood of attendance = desire + cost utility - barriers. His first event made a 40% profit on ticket sales against a 25% benchmark and sold more than 800 tickets. He later built a forecasting model from more than 30 event P&Ls.
- Wasserman: with almost no structured data on non-traditional women's sports, his team produced a ranked shortlist of six properties with valuation ranges and three-year growth forecasts, and named women's tennis as the category to pursue. Less than a year later, WTA Ventures appointed Wasserman as its sales agency of record (April 2025). https://antonio.ac/thesis/wasserman-wta-case
- Agora Grove: product categories for diet-aware search were defined through research with chefs, farmers, and beta users.
- Game of Any Kind: a market thesis on local food distribution and the weaknesses of broadline distributors. https://antonio.ac/thesis/game-of-any-kind

### Leading teams and influencing without authority

- Wasserman: 70 interns were split at random into peer teams with no assigned lead. Antonio set the team's direction in the first meeting with three working principles (global scope, find the dominant category, build for the executives who would act on it). The team delivered in eight weeks, and the Global Insights VP took the framework into development.
- House Hats: he was the youngest manager in the Gainesville branch's history. Rather than telling executives their model was wrong, he walked them through the numbers so they reached the conclusion themselves. The company then extended its planning horizon from two months to two years and built a plan to scale from one branch to 15. He owned event strategy, live production, and the P&L, and raised core event ROI from 54% to 71% year over year.
- IBM: he worked across data pipeline owners, stakeholders, and a hybrid cloud deployment, and earned production access to software that users paid tens of thousands of dollars for. He adopted IBM's Carbon Design System so the team could spend its limited time on the product instead of building components.

### Using data to make product decisions

- IBM Telos: comparing sales intensity across peer accounts surfaced $75M in potential annual expansion opportunities. Telos flags missing loss reasons in 70% of lost deals and removed 9 hours of manual RevOps analysis a week.
- Neptune for Men, his first product: about $5,000 in sales with under 5% repeat purchases. He worked out that the LTV to CAC ratio could not reach 3:1 with that product and distribution, and chose to stop instead of relaunching. https://antonio.ac/thesis/neptune

### Using AI to redesign workflows, with measured results

- Agora Grove: onboarding a new farm went from 3.5 weeks to 90 seconds and now runs on its own at about $0.05 per farm. AI agents keep a farm's inventory, pricing, and storefront current from the owner's phone, and match hand-built catalog prices with 99.8% accuracy.
- IBM: Telos replaced manual Excel analysis with one revenue work queue. He built a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so agents could query live CRM, revenue, deployment, and usage data.
- Accel Construction: an AI bid-review system that extracts RFP requirements, scores drafts for compliance, and flags omissions. Proposal drafting went from 6 hours to 1, and compliance accuracy rose 40% across 54 RFPs.

### Responsible AI: human review, release gates, and accuracy checks

- People approve before anything goes live. At Agora Grove, AI turns texts and handwritten inventory photos into catalog drafts that the farmer approves before publishing. At IBM, Telos drafts seller follow-ups for a person to review and sends low-confidence output to human review.
- Accuracy gates before release. The Agora Grove personalization system had to reach 90% classification accuracy before release. At Accel, compliance accuracy was the release gate.
- Accuracy is measured, not assumed: 99.8% price match against hand-built catalogs at Agora Grove, and a 40% compliance accuracy gain across 54 RFPs at Accel.

### Keeping current with AI

- He builds with AI tools every day: agent orchestration, MCP servers, and prompt and context engineering.
- His essay Axiom of Reducibility asks whether LLMs can reason past their training data, using time-bounded training snapshots, structured causal models, and tool-grounded reasoning. https://antonio.ac/thesis/axiom-of-reducibility
- His essay Design is the New Product argues that as AI makes backend capability cheaper, the product edge moves to clarity: how state changes, how much appears at once, and whether the next action is obvious. https://antonio.ac/thesis/design-is-the-new-product

## Experience

- Agora Grove, Founder & Product Engineer, Miami, FL, June 2026 to present
- IBM (zAIOps), Product Manager Intern, San Jose, CA, May to August 2026
- Accel Construction Services Group, AI Product Builder (contract co-op), Chicago, IL, May to August 2025
- Wasserman Media Group (now The Team), Brands & Properties Intern, Raleigh, NC, June to August 2024
- House Hats Collective, Project Management Lead, Gainesville, FL, May 2024 to August 2025
- Neptune for Men, Founder, a men's body care brand launched during Covid while he was in high school

## Work

- [TelosZ](https://antonio.ac/telosz/): live demo of the revenue intelligence app from his IBM zAIOps work
- [Agora Grove](https://agoragrove.com): AI agents that turn a farmer's voice, photos, and paperwork into the tools to run the business
- [Perplexity Interface](https://antonio.ac/thesis/perplexity-interface.md): product proposal with a five-minute pitch, full deck, success metrics, and transcript
- [Running a Show](https://antonio.ac/thesis/running-a-stage.md): House Hats case study on demand research, forecasting, and changing an executive team's mind
- [Three Fundamental Truths](https://antonio.ac/thesis/wasserman-wta-case.md): Wasserman case study on leading a peer team through an ambiguous market analysis

## Writing

- [Design is the New Product](https://antonio.ac/thesis/design-is-the-new-product.md) (September 21, 2026): lessons from IBM and Agora Grove on designing products
- [Axiom of Reducibility](https://antonio.ac/thesis/axiom-of-reducibility.md) (January 23, 2026): a proposal for testing whether LLMs can reason past their training horizon
- [Game of Any Kind](https://antonio.ac/thesis/game-of-any-kind.md) (August 19, 2025): a thesis for local food infrastructure
- [On Failure](https://antonio.ac/thesis/neptune.md): what launching and shutting down Neptune taught him about acquisition and retention

## Optional

- [Full text of every page](https://antonio.ac/llms-full.txt)
- [Homepage](https://antonio.ac/)