Think of this as a brief orientation to who Daren L. Fields is.

Daren Fields is a commercialization strategist, venture operator, and enterprise technologist with decades of experience spanning SaaS, industrial enterprise, manufacturing systems, and emerging AI platforms. His work focuses on helping organizations translate complex technology into durable commercial outcomes, particularly in environments where risk, scale, and execution determine success.

During his formative years, Daren spent several seasons immersed in the motorsports paddock, gaining firsthand exposure to the business of elite competition. That experience shaped his perspective on high-pressure execution, team dynamics, capital efficiency, and the reality that performance without results does not endure. The lessons of the paddock, precision, preparation, and continuous improvement, continue to influence how he approaches commercialization in complex industrial environments.

Daren was directly involved in early enterprise AI commercialization efforts at Infor, pre-ChatGPT, working under the leadership of Charles Phillips, Ed Allen, and Soma Somasundaram. During this period, he played a front-line role in initiatives tied to the Infor and AWS strategic partnership, gaining early exposure to large-scale cloud migration, data platform modernization, and applied machine learning in real enterprise settings.

Across his career, he has worked with, for, and against many of the industry’s core enterprise platforms, including Infor, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, Google Cloud, Epicor, IFS, and AWS-aligned ecosystems. His experience spans pricing and monetization strategy, go-to-market design, sales and solution consulting leadership, and revenue operations transformation across on-premise, hybrid, and cloud-native models. He is particularly fluent in how ERP, manufacturing systems, and adjacent enterprise applications intersect with organizational behavior and capital constraints.

More recently, Daren’s work has centered on AI-native systems and agentic platforms. He has designed and advised on intelligent agent architectures that support commercialization, sales execution, and executive decision-making, with a focus on orchestrating AI around existing systems of record rather than attempting to replace them. This work draws on hands-on experience with large language models, prompt engineering, and human-in-the-loop AI design, informed by formal technical training and direct implementation work.

Daren is the author of Apex 8: The Art of Persuasion in a Technical World (2025), which distills his approach to helping technical leaders, founders, and operators communicate value, align stakeholders, and make decisions in complex environments. His current work sits at the intersection of enterprise software, AI systems, and human judgment, advising executives, investors, and operators who are navigating the practical realities of building, commercializing, and scaling technology in the AI era.

Should you ever wish to connect, share insights, or discuss something you are building, you will know how to reach him.

Hopefully, we will see you down the road.