Our Story
Before ChatGPT even launched.
We started advising executives on AI before the world knew what AI meant. We've been doing the work ever since.
Founder & CEO
Matt has led 18 corporate AI engagements, training 500+ leaders — from CEOs and board members to front-line managers — with more slated for 2026. More than 2,000 professionals have come through SAVANT-AI's courses and workshops.
Before founding SAVANT-AI in 2022, he spent 18 years in private banking and investment management, advising wealthy families at firms including J.P. Morgan Private Bank and UBS. He is a United States Marine, a Columbia University graduate, and began his career as a production artist at Morgan Stanley.
He created the SAVANT 5 framework, the ThinkPrint methodology, and the SLI and SMI assessment systems that measure individual and organizational AI readiness. He builds and manages his own agentic AI systems daily — and remains tool-agnostic by principle, because the landscape changes weekly and the sherpa's job is the mountain, not the gear.
His value is in reading a room, meeting each person where they are, and guiding them through five levels of mastery at their pace, in their language.
Education: MBA from Cranfield School of Management (UK), BA with Honors in Literature-Writing from Columbia University, AI Certificate from Stanford Continuing Studies.
Certifications: AWS Certified AI Practitioner, Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals, Google AI Essentials.
Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer
Christian is Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer of SAVANT-AI. He formulates and advises on the company's AI strategy — tools, vendors, products, guardrails, research direction — and represents the company's AI posture in client engagements and industry forums.
He has been building with technology for 26 years, from gaming systems to AI-powered automation. He architects the systems behind SAVANT-AI's training platform, runs community operations in The Room, and co-delivers every live session alongside Matt.
Technical by nature, teacher by instinct — equally comfortable configuring an agentic workflow or walking a first-time user through their first conversation with AI.
Education: East High School and Interlochen (creative discipline), Community College of Denver (programming, psychology, cybersecurity).
The work began before the company.
In 2016, while advising high-net-worth families at Fidelity Investments — after years serving billionaires and hedge fund managers at J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Palm Beach — Matt began researching AI and what it would mean for business leadership. He saw what was coming. He started preparing.
When the generative AI wave arrived in late 2022, he was ready. SAVANT-AI was incorporated in October of that year — weeks before ChatGPT changed the public conversation. He brought his son Christian into the work as Co-Founder.
The practice matured a couple of years in. In the early Microsoft-Copilot era — when the product was still more marketing promise than working tool — Matt and Christian made a practical call together with a client's CEO: train his team on ChatGPT, because ChatGPT actually worked. A few weeks into that engagement, one of the leaders in the room — Dave, a third-generation president and owner of a family business — asked the sharper question. Not which tool, but how does this actually get into my workflow tomorrow morning? So they built. Dave received his own custom GPTs — including one that coached his golf swing. He won a couple of holes that weekend and told his Vistage group; two referrals followed, and a year later he asked them to train the team at his second company. Dave's question put the bug in their ear that the industry needed to hear: implementation is the work. The SAVANT 5 — and the practice that surrounds it — is built from the answer.
What began in a private wealth office is now a company of two co-founders, an Austin headquarters, eighteen corporate AI engagements completed, and more than two thousand professionals trained. The mission is the same one Matt was thinking about in 2016: executives deserve better than tool demos. They deserve frameworks for leading through change.
"I have seen Mr. Matthew Burton work well with clients in a diligent and thoughtful manner." — Anthony Chan, Ph.D., Chief Economist, JPMorgan Private Wealth Management
AI is a tool, not a replacement. Our job is to make executives more capable, not more dependent.
Real transformation requires sustained engagement, organizational support, and the courage to redesign how work gets done.
Ethics and governance aren't add-ons—they're built into how we teach, how we advise, and how we operate.
Generic recommendations waste everyone's time. We meet executives where they are and build roadmaps for where they're going.