Dr. Dan Mitchell

Dan Mitchell is an Expert at Strop Insights and a Clinical Associate Professor at The University of Texas McCombs School of Business, where he teaches artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and optimization and serves as associate director of the Center for Analytics and Transformative Technologies.

Dan's work sits at the point where new technology has to prove it is worth the money. He works with executives on where AI fits in their business and where it doesn't, leads courses on building practical AI workflows and intelligent agents, and runs industry projects that pair analytics teams with companies to solve real problems using the company's own data. Recent projects have ranged from predicting which customers will convert or churn, to extracting structured insight from thousands of unstructured customer reviews, to building AI-ready datasets from large, disconnected public data sources.

He also teaches executive education programs on using AI effectively, including sessions for sales teams at large technology companies and for statewide member organizations.

At Strop, Dan helps clients answer two questions that are easy to skip in the rush to adopt AI: what specifically do we want to know, and what is the right way to get there. He brings the judgment to decide which analysis to run, when a language model is the right tool and when it is the wrong one, and how to structure data so the answer is precise rather than approximate. The result is work that used to take a team weeks now taking days, with a data scientist checking that it is right.

Dan's research focuses on financial analytics, including recent work in Operations Research on how regulation affects risk across interbank lending networks. He earned his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin and previously held faculty positions at the University of Minnesota and Singapore University of Technology and Design.