The Team
Kareem Hersi
A decade of management consulting at Accenture, EY, and Deloitte put Kareem on the people side of major technology rollouts. That meant change management, training, and the unglamorous work that ultimately decides whether a deployment lands inside an organization. He saw firsthand which leaders treated adoption as a strategic discipline, and which ones treated it as an afterthought.
Two years ago, Kareem was using AI the same way most professionals still do: getting outputs that were technically correct but rarely useful. The excitement around him did not match the experience in his hands. He knew the difference between acceptable and excellent, and he was not willing to settle for the former.
So he turned the lens he had spent a career pointing at clients onto himself. He stopped expecting the tool to infer his intent and started learning how to communicate it. He mapped where AI was genuinely strong, where it broke down, and what kind of input it rewarded. That shift is the foundation of Marathon AI.
The firm is built around two instincts that most AI conversations treat as opposites: real empathy for the people being asked to change, and very little patience for the systems that slow them down. The people side of technology transformation has never mattered more, and it has rarely been more poorly served.
“Every leader says they’re an AI-forward organization. The honest ones can tell you what they’re willing to give up to make it true.”
Sam Plaquin
Sam Plaquin leads the technical work at Marathon AI. He has spent years building models, pipelines, and analytical tools, and just as much time making that work useful to people who don’t live inside the data.
His path into AI and data was not traditional. He studied economics at the University of Calgary, got pulled into AI through econometrics, and taught himself to code without ever taking a formal programming class. That work eventually helped spin out a machine learning startup out of university. Years of playing and coaching high-level hockey shaped his approach too. He combined his understanding of the game with analytics and translated the numbers into something players and coaches could actually use, work he likes to think played a small role in helping a very talented team win its first league championship in 24 years.
He later moved into government because he wanted his work to matter beyond business outcomes. Over time he became the person others turned to for help with AI, automation, and analysis, and that turned out to be the part of the job he liked most. Helping someone feel less stuck and more capable was more rewarding than any model he built on his own. That’s still what drives the work now.
“AI is powerful, but the real opportunity is not in throwing it at everything. It is in helping people understand it well enough to trust it, enjoy using it, and spend less of their life on work that drains them and more on work that feels creative, meaningful, and human.”
Kareem and Sam are supported by an extensive team of consultants that they have worked with for years. Based on the needs of each engagement, specific team members and specialists are called upon as the scope requires. Each engagement receives a team tailored to the needs of the client.