Washington DC-Baltimore Area
Hi, I'm William. Beyond my technical role, I find joy in listening to non-fiction audiobooks & podcasts (Acquired, Lenny, Dwarkesh) and sharing my reflections through the following channels: 1. Bi-weekly in-person AI Discussion Club in downtown DC (luma.com/ai-discussion-club) 2. Write inspiring short stories about innovators, builders, and risk-takers via weekly LinkedIn Posts. (https://williamzhu.ai/stories) 3. Vibe code fun side projects (https://williamzhu.ai/projects) Here is a list of my all-time favorite books (https://williamzhu.ai/books), curated from 800+ books that I've completed over the years. These books have had a profound impact on my lifestyle, worldview, and business philosophy. Hope you find them valuable as well. Enjoy!
- Driving ~$30M in annual franchise revenue lift by designing and deploying ML model recommending event-driven rate adjustments across 6,000+ properties, enabling Revenue Managers to optimize pricing for upcoming sports, concerts, and local events - Improved email click-through rate by 70% by building personalized destination recommendation models to drive engagement - 2X’d Advanced Analytics Department (~40 members) productivity by architecting a reusable AI knowledge base and driving department-wide adoption, enabling full automation of analytics workflow (text-to-sql, charts generation, slide deck drafting) - Saved ~20 weekly hours for global sales team by deploying Choice’s first production-grade RAG AI pipeline to automate matching between ~1K daily group reservations and ~2K enterprise business account (AWS Bedrock, FAISS, Pydantic) - Led enterprise-wide AI workshops for 600+ associates to drive responsible adoption of AI tools (Copilot, ChatGPT, Codex) - Selected as 2025 Choice Innovation Award Finalist (top 5 out of ~1,800 associates);
- Improved high-value guest and fraud detection efficiency by building customer lifetime value and fraud detection ML models - Selected as 2023 Choice MVP Award Finalist (top 5 out of ~1,800 associates);
- Automated cohort analysis reports for CEO, CFO, and board of directors that helped secure $16M Series A funding - Increased Customer Lifetime Value by 17% by identifying high-retention promo offer strategies
- Solidified brand positioning strategy for the CMO by identifying top customers persona using logistic regressions and decision trees; compiled customer database by merging sales records, Google Analytics API, U.S. Census, gender-guesser Python package, and Zillow home value index
- Contributed to 8 program evaluation projects by performing data analysis and report writings for clients including U.S. Department of Education, Verizon, and National Science Foundation - Co-authored an article titled “Using state datasets and meta-analysis of low-powered studies to evaluate a school-based dropout prevention program for students with disabilities” in Studies in Educational Evaluation - Co-authored an evaluation report for Racial Equity Action Leadership (REAL) Program to show that the program is effective at guiding 30+ participants to craft racial equity plan for their companies via survey data analysis