Self-taught product designer and applied AI product engineer, picked by Palantir from 3,500+ applicants, rebuilds company operations around data and AI agents.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, September 29, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Jacopo Spina, an ex-Palantir founding product designer and applied AI product engineer, today opened his AI transformation practice to a limited number of new companies. The practice helps digital-native companies and founders redesign their core business processes around AI agents to cut operating costs and grow revenue without adding headcount. Until now it has worked only by referral, mostly with founders and leaders from the Palantir network. His message to leaders is simple: don’t add AI to broken work. Redesign the work.
Spina starts by mapping how a company really works: its processes, finances and teams. He picks the area where change will pay back most, then designs and builds the next version of that process with a shared data layer, collaborative workflows between people and AI, and AI agents that take on repetitive work. Every engagement is measured in one of three ways: the business moves faster, spends less or earns more.
“Most companies are running AI theatre. Their data sits in systems that don’t talk to each other, their teams hand work over by email, and the AI they bought watches from the side,” said Spina. “Like an architect who is also the engineer, I design the experience and build the structure underneath it.”
Why redesign beats adding tools
MIT’s 2025 GenAI Divide report found that 95% of organisations saw no measurable profit-and-loss return from generative AI. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey found that redesigning workflows has the strongest link to bottom-line impact, yet only 21% of companies using generative AI had redesigned any workflows. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027.
From a print shop to Palantir
Spina grew up in Aprilia, a town of about 75,000 people south of Rome, and came of age in the hardest job market Italy has recorded for young people: in 2014, the year he turned 24, Italian youth unemployment reached 42.7%. He started as a helper at a local print shop and taught himself human-computer interaction, software design and engineering basics, from Alan Dix’s Human-Computer Interaction to Carl Jung’s work on archetypes.
After working at Citi Innovation Lab he went deeper, completing an MA at University of the Arts London. In 2021 Palantir hired him as one of three designers selected from more than 3,500 applicants. There he owned the Ontology experience, the shared data layer behind Palantir Foundry and Gotham, aligning 8 teams and cutting time on task by about 20%.
A record of building from zero
– Desia: turned the founders’ idea into a product that won 4 design partners and helped raise a $3.3M pre-seed round.
– Astrobee: took an AI agent that turns raw data into an ontology from idea to working product in one month.
– An AI-native freight platform: designed how operators work alongside AI agents that run quoting end to end; first-step drop-off fell from 44.8% to 29%, and he shipped more than 670 front-end commits himself.
– Clarium Health: cut hospital disruption time by 50%, reduced substitution requests by 45% and delivered $1.5M in productivity savings.
– Today, through a new company in stealth, he is working with top-tier UK hospitals to transform their operations with AI agents.
At a glance
Who is Jacopo Spina? A London-based founding product designer and applied AI product engineer, formerly at Palantir, who designs and builds AI agent products and redesigns business processes around them.
What problems does he solve? Rising operating costs, slow manual processes such as quoting, operations and supply chain, and AI pilots that never reach production.
How do companies work with him? Spina takes on only a few full-time engagements at a time, in Europe and the United States, most of them through introductions. Companies can reach him through his portfolio or LinkedIn.
About Jacopo Spina
Jacopo Spina is a founding product designer and applied AI product engineer with 15 years of experience designing software across iOS, Android, web, desktop and spatial platforms. He has designed for Palantir, Citi, Google, Vodafone and Lloyds Bank, and for venture-backed AI start-ups. His rule for every company: don’t add AI to broken work. Redesign the work.
Jacopo Spina
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