AI and business transformation, from cement plants to owner-led businesses

Make AI work where work gets done.

I find where an operation loses skilled hours to quoting, dispatching, reporting, and chasing information, put a number on it, and build the fix that holds where the work happens.

Heavy industry operator who builds production AI systems · Ex-CEMEX and LafargeHolcim

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Open to full-time, contract, and project work.

From the plant floor to connected workflows. Building materials · Construction · Manufacturing

Selected work

Industry experience. Implementation evidence.

Results in real businesses, in numbers, then the same method with AI.

Ready-mix, US and Canada / Digital transformation

Connecting the plant, the driver, and the job site.

Ready-mix deliveries depend on coordination. Customers had no arrival visibility, trucks waited on site, and paper tickets slowed access to delivery records.

Proposed four digital ventures to the global Executive Committee; originated the concept of the approved one and led the business side of its development with BCG Digital Ventures: a three-app platform (dispatch web app, driver app, customer app) for ready-mix, known today as ConcreteDirect. Taken from a 77-truck, 5-plant pilot in Boston to commercial rollout across the US and Canada.

77-truck pilot. Equipped and trained around a live operation, then scaled nationally.

Defined industry requirements and integration needs.
Coordinated pilot equipment, parallel data entry, and driver training.
Gathered market feedback and prioritized the product roadmap.

Dispatch, driver, and customer applications connected in one workflow

Contracting, Arizona / Commercial process redesign

Better bids. A fuller view of profit.

The Arizona contracting business was narrowly losing bids while pricing without visibility into the contribution from internally supplied ready-mix, cement, aggregates, and asphalt.

Built a margin-visibility tool and helped reset targets and incentives so teams could bid competitively while accounting for profitability across the whole group.

about 30% more bids won, within six to twelve months of introducing the tool and changing the bidding approach.

Retrospective re-bidding tested the approach before adoption; in some cases contracting covered its costs while the materials businesses earned the contribution.

ContractingReady-mixCementAggregatesAsphalt

Cement, ready-mix and aggregates, US / Value nobody had priced

Revenue where there was cost.

$12M in merger synergies. Freight turned from a cost into revenue. A $20M operations KPI program across US ready-mix and aggregates. A new product line from discarded quarry fines. A lightweight-aggregates import business with $600K profit in year one.

GTF / Organization redesign

From 88 direct reports to a working executive team.

Founder-led businesses that had outgrown their organization. The largest: a founder with 88 direct reports who wanted to hire a COO. Restructured first, hired to the gaps second: departments with defined remits, a small executive team she could trust, leaders hired and replaced where needed.

Six years and 100+ clients in sectors including steel and steel-coil manufacturing, metal fabrication, propane and natural gas, solar, electrical, water treatment, construction, and construction-materials testing equipment, through the advisory and talent firm I founded and ran in Chicago. Four to five restructurings. The firm itself turned around after COVID with 30% revenue growth.

International school group / The P&L that funds transformation

From a six-figure annual loss to break-even.

CFO of an international network of 11 schools in 8 countries, $40M+ in revenue, team of 12. A UK school taken from a six-figure annual loss to projected break-even through policy reform, restructuring, and tighter billing accountability. Reporting consolidated and standardized across the 8 countries.

JBL Consulting

Small AI wins for owner-led businesses.

Pick the task your team hates most. Live in two to four weeks, one number that moves.

See how it works

My approach

Start with the constraint. Then choose the tools.

Find the hours.

Work with the team to map where skilled people lose time to work that creates no value: quotes retyped, orders entered twice, reports assembled by hand, information chased across systems.

Price the leak.

Put a number on it before anyone commits. ProfitScan, a four-week diagnostic, shows where margin is leaking and what it is worth.

Build the fix.

Connect the people, information, decisions, and handovers. Use AI where the business case holds; integrate with what the operation already runs.

Stay until it holds.

Train the people using it, build in the review points, and track the result against a baseline.

HoursOrdersMargin

Adoption where the work happens is the deliverable. The objective is fewer hours on work that creates no value, not fewer people.

AI in practice

Connected workflows. People in control.

In daily use

AIOS: the operating system behind JBL Consulting and NoraVoz

A connected workspace of my own design for meetings, relationships, research, outreach, and priorities. Meeting notes become follow-up drafts and linked tasks that surface in the daily dashboard. Company and contact records keep the history. Outreach is drafted and verified against each prospect's own website. The weekly content queue writes itself. A scheduled agent tends the system overnight. Outbound email and social content are reviewed before anything is sent.

Claude and Claude Code, Codex, Obsidian, Google Workspace, Granola, Notion, TickTick, GitHub, and whatever earns its place next month.

Illustration of the working process; no live client data.

Capture the meetingread the transcript, write it up
Prepare the follow-upreconstruct commitments, draft an email
Connect the next stepscopy actions into separate lists and records
Keep priorities visiblereview separate calendars, notes, task lists

every handover is a separate manual action and another place to keep up to date.

Built end to end

From an inquiry to a booked visit.

An AI product taken from idea to a working, real-world system, built end to end with no engineering team. NoraVoz answers inbound calls, chat, and WhatsApp for schools, in under three seconds, 24/7, in the caller's language: questions from a school-specific knowledge base, visits and calls scheduled against calendar availability, reminders sent, the CRM updated with family details. Conversational AI, telephony, calendars, and CRM connected in one workflow, tested end to end on a working demo school and demonstrated to multi-school groups and dental groups in the US and Spain. Built for admissions first; the same agent, knowledge base, and integrations run for any inbound-call operation with little or no modification, from clinics and dealerships to the order desk of a building-materials distributor.

Retell AI · GoHighLevel · HubSpot · Cal.com · Twilio / Telnyx · WhatsApp Business API

Visit NoraVoz

NoraVoz routes voice, chat, and messages through one workflow to a booked visit and CRM

About Jordi

I know the work behind the workflow.

Industrial engineer by training. My industrial career began with the work itself: process engineering, maintenance, and quarry operations at CEMEX, then strategic planning and business development across cement, ready-mix, aggregates, and asphalt, from plant operations to M&A.

At LafargeHolcim, reporting to the global Executive Committee for North America and Mexico, I took the same instinct into technology: four digital ventures proposed, the approved one taken from idea to commercial rollout with BCG Digital Ventures.

Six years advising owner-led industrial businesses in the US Midwest through the firm I founded and ran, then a CFO seat over 11 schools in 8 countries, added what transformation always needs: knowing what an owner will pay for, and running the P&L that funds it.

Since 2025, AI applied to the same problems: NoraVoz, and the AI operating system that runs both my companies. Professor of AI and Digital Business Transformation on EU Business School's Master's AI programme.

Same job as day one. Better tools.

My full career on LinkedIn

Teaching practical AI judgment

I teach AI and Digital Business Transformation at master's level at EU Business School's Digital Campus. Students identify a real task, justify the investment in automation, and define the business outcome. Also MBA Marketing (Malta Leadership Institute) and previously MBA Financial Planning & Analysis (EU Business School).

Guest masterclass, November 2026: Your First AI Win at Work: results without breaking the rules, EU Business School Digital Campus.

Engineering foundation. Business perspective.

MBA · IESE Business School
MS & BS · Industrial Engineering, University of Miami

AI transformation and adoptionChange management and workforce trainingDigital product delivery, idea to commercializationWorkflow redesign and automationProfit improvement, pricing and P&LCement, ready-mix, aggregates and asphalt economics and operations

Open to roles and projects

Where could better processes take you?

AI adoption, business transformation, and workflow improvement.

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Full-time or interim leadership

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Discuss a project

Contract work or a focused engagement

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jlbarguno@gmail.com · LinkedIn