# John Cornelius

AI & Six Sigma Lead at a national building-products manufacturer. Based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. US-eligible. Open to roles, advisory engagements, and serious conversations.

corn82@icloud.com · github.com/corn8200

## Summary

AI & Six Sigma Lead at a national building-products manufacturer — a 24/7 continuous-process operation. I scale real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, AI-tuned process control, and operator-facing automation across nine manufacturing plants. The discipline behind it comes from a twenty-year Army aviation career: standardize the work, train the standard, evaluate performance, then improve the system.

## Experience

### National building-products manufacturer — AI & Six Sigma Lead (Corporate)

*2024 — present.* Lead AI and Six Sigma practice across nine plants. Bring proven operational AI patterns out of one operation and into the broader enterprise: real-time analytics, predictive control, digital-twin monitoring, automated reporting, and the human workflow that has to surround each of those for them to stick on a factory floor.

### National building-products manufacturer — Operations Manager → AI & Six Sigma Lead

*2022 — 2024.* Joined as Quality and Raw Materials Manager. Promoted twice in roughly three years: to Operations Manager, then to the corporate AI & Six Sigma Lead role. Owned plant accountability for safety, quality, production, cost, and people. Shipped real-time analytics, AI-based PID tuning, AI-assisted shift hand-offs, and SCADA-driven digital-twin monitoring. Process waste and downtime improvements are finance-verified and documented internally; I can walk through the before/after method in a private conversation.

### U.S. Army — Aviation, Special Operations, and Service Leadership

*2001 — 2021.* Twenty years across ground operations and rotary-wing aviation. Earned the Warrant Officer rating and qualified as a Standardization Instructor Pilot: the pilot who trains and evaluates other pilots. Deployed across multiple theaters. Managed multi-million-dollar aviation assets and a multi-million-dollar test and evaluation program with a strong safety record. The through-line is standardization, precision under pressure, and continuous improvement.

## Education

**Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University**
- Master of Science, Unmanned Systems
- Bachelor of Science, Aeronautics

Both completed during active military service. The Unmanned Systems graduate work was a useful bridge to current AI engineering — autonomous systems are a human-autonomy teaming problem long before they are a model problem.

## Skills

**Manufacturing & operations.** Six Sigma. Lean. SCADA. PID control. Real-time process analytics. Predictive maintenance. Digital twins. Plant safety and quality programs. P&L accountability.

**AI & automation.** Anthropic and OpenAI APIs (Claude, GPT-5). Prompt engineering. Retrieval-augmented generation. Multi-agent orchestration. Voice cloning and streaming TTS. Vector databases. MCP-based integrations. Power Apps + AI hybrid tooling.

**Engineering & data.** Python. TypeScript. SQL. Postgres / pgvector. Cloudflare Workers and Pages. Modern frontend (Astro, Next.js). Git-based workflows. CI/CD.

**Leadership.** Multi-plant operational management. Standardization instructor experience. Test and evaluation program management. Multi-country aviation operations.

## Operating style

I do best where the technical system and the human system have to meet. Whether that is lining up an aircraft for an instrument approach in zero visibility or rolling AI tooling out to operators who have run a process by feel for thirty years, the operating principle is the same: standardize, train, evaluate, improve.

## Outside work

West Virginia rivers. Kayaking and e-biking, mostly with my two boys. Married to Ashley.

## Contact

- Email: corn82@icloud.com
- GitHub: [corn8200](https://github.com/corn8200)
- Based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. US-eligible, comfortable with travel.
- Open to: AI/automation leadership in industrial or operational settings, advisory engagements, and conversations with veterans transitioning into industry.