Rafa Flores’ career has come full circle.
In 2016, he joined Treasure Data (which rebranded earlier this year to Treasure AI) as the company’s second-ever product hire.
At the time, Treasure Data was just getting off the ground as a data management company. The company soon found an opportunity in the CDP space, a label it wore proudly for many years.
The trouble, said Flores, is that “people don’t see the value in the data foundation” and end up wondering, “Why am I paying for this?”
The accolades instead go to the activation systems, which actually launch the campaigns, he added.
By the time Flores rejoined Treasure in 2025 as chief product and growth officer, the company had a new goal: to build out its own activation layer.
Now called Treasure AI, the company touts itself as an “intelligent” CDP.
Last year, it came out with an omnichannel orchestration product called Engagement AI Suite, in which advertisers can deliver personalized messages and develop their own agents.
Flores’ role focused on building out secure and efficient AI workflows and designing the suite to ensure it could both target the right audiences and deliver ads across channels, including email and SMS.
But Flores’ experience with product development isn’t limited to his professional life. After experiencing a serious injury several years ago, Flores developed epilepsy and was having up to 20 seizures a day.
His doctor suggested that he learn what his auras, or warning signs, were, and determine his triggers – and what better way to do it than developing a predictive model trained on his individual experience?
Flores spoke with AdExchanger about Treasure AI’s new positioning, and how he developed a new AI model to address his health.
What exactly makes a CDP “intelligent,” and how exactly does it work?
It’s the ability to have the AI agent foundry [the tool for building and deploying agents] embedded into the CDP.
It includes agents, but also [machine learning] models such as next best product, next best action, next best recommended step, things like that.
The feedback from customers was like, “Hey, this is great, it’s coming together. But how can I now manage this whole thing?”
And that led to Treasure AI studio, which is a parent orchestrator that allows you to orchestrate everything underneath in plain English. You can literally go into the product and say, “Hey, I want to run a campaign for cross sales across the following pet care segments, but I’m not sure if this is the best segment.” Or, “Rebuild the segment for me and tell me why this is the best segment.” Or, “I’m aiming for conversions of 45%; you go build a journey for me.”
We still give people the ability to do it using the old software model. There’s a UI, and people can go and do manual checks or do the whole thing manually if they choose to.
What brought you back to Treasure AI after so many years?
In full candor, I’m close friends with the CEO and the board. And so, first off, it’s a friend coming to me saying, “Hey, we want you back. We think you can help us with XYZ.” But the XYZ was also compelling in the sense that they said, “We want to build fast.” My DNA is just to build fast and fix things.
I’ve been in corporate America. I don’t do well in corporate America because I get bored. It’s not for me. I had an opportunity to build fast, to go and be disruptive. That’s what drew me back to the company.
I’m not scared of competitors because I think everyone’s a competitor now. There’s no such thing as an ankle biter, right? So my focus is on how fast we can build a meaningful product that scales and delivers.
We can do that in a day if we have the right team and operate in the right way, and there’s that trust between product and engineering.
Is there any concern among engineers about their jobs being taken away, now that so much of their role can be automated?
We don’t believe AI is going to take jobs away. And I know that’s a tricky one because you see in the news, like, Oracle fired X number of people. We don’t believe in that.
We believe that AI is going to do a lot of the stuff that people don’t like doing and shouldn’t be doing, so they can focus on what makes them the strongest.
Our engineers are the ones that review all things. If we automate everything, it comes from them dictating that, and so that’s their strongest suit. They know how to write production-quality code that’s safe and governed. I want them to focus on that.
You’ve also incorporated AI in your personal life as a way of addressing some health issues. Can you tell me a bit about that?
In 2022, I had a major injury, and I was seizing quite a bit.
At first, it was 20 times a day. Then five times a day. I kept switching medication, and a lot of the medications were not working for me.
This neurologist said to me, “You have to learn what your auras are and what triggers them. And as soon as you feel something, get ahead of it – take your emergency medication or rush to an ER.”
And that stuck with me. I said, okay, wait a minute. My body’s telling me something, right? Before it happens, what am I giving my body to prevent it?
So I started just note-taking. When you’re about to have a seizure, a lot of times you kind of get this metallic taste in your mouth. Whenever that happened, I would take the emergency medication and then look back and say, okay, what did I do today? Where was I? What did I do the last couple of days?
I started up all this information, and then I started playing with my own model. It’s not an LLM, but a machine learning model to predict trends.
Over time, it started telling me that when you are more exposed to screen time, when you’re overly exposed to noise, when you have been traveling X amount, there’s a high likeliness of being at risk. It gave me a risk indicator, and when to take a break.
The model scans all the notes, loads them into a database, runs some machine learning, and predictive analytics on top. It visualizes that and sends signals to my phone, and then that will trigger an alert to me.
That’s really incredible. How has it affected your life – and do you plan to keep working on it?
I think epilepsy is one of those things that’s very misunderstood, and people don’t get it. It affects me in so many ways that people don’t know, like the fact that you lose your driver’s license for three months after a seizure.
It’s terrible. So there is a market for the model at some point in the future – at no profit. I don’t want to make a profit out of it.
I’ve been good for three years now. I’m on epilepsy medication, but I am a firm believer that I need the right medication and the right way of learning how to live with something new.
Without that support system, aka the tech I had for myself, I probably wouldn’t even be working today.
These are the use cases of AI that are so impactful. I know we don’t often build for them, but it’s so powerful when we can build the right things with it.