No ringback
Eighteen months inside a system that couldn't tell me whether my own work was happening.
Richard Rios — Operator & Writer
Judgment about how real work actually gets done.
Fourteen years in regulated financial services taught me that the hardest problems rarely live in the model—they live in the workflow. Today I build AI systems for regulated operations and write about the judgment, governance, and architecture behind them.
What I
work on
Regulated operations
Running the workflows where mistakes are expensive and "move fast" is not an option — reconciliations, controls, exceptions, the unglamorous machinery that has to be right.
Risk & controls
Designing for the failure case first. Where the real edges are, who owns them, and how a control keeps working after the person who built it has moved on.
Applied AI
Putting language models to work inside processes that already have rules, auditors, and consequences — usefully, and without pretending the hard parts disappeared.
Writing it down
The thinking lives in the Field Notes. Each one is a small attempt to be precise about something I had to figure out in practice.
Recent Field Notes
Recent Field Notes
Taking my own medicine
A studio with no client case studies owes a different kind of proof. So I ran my own methodology on my own tool — and it failed its first review.
What a benchmark is really a contract for
I've been the person who had to make a vendor's system hold up to an audit. That's why the industry's move to computer-use benchmarks reads, to me, as a procurement problem first.
Upstream / downstream
The thinking begins here. The client work happens at Rios Applied AI.
This site is where ideas get worked out in public. When they turn into systems built for a specific business, that happens through my practice, Rios Applied AI — the same judgment, applied under contract.