Aarón Ayllón Benítez

AI & Data Science Leader · Enterprise ML, GenAI & Agentic Platforms · Team and Portfolio Ownership

PhD Computer Science · MSc Artificial Intelligence. I lead a team of 16 data scientists and engineers at BASF Digital Solutions, own two production AI/ML platforms, and make the portfolio calls that follow — including recommending the closure of one of my own.

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€3M+
recurring savings from portfolio decisions
8 → 16
team scaled, hired and developed
2
production AI/ML platforms owned end-to-end
~100
data scientists served by the platforms owned
Aarón Ayllón Benítez

Executive Summary

Data scientist turned AI/ML leader. Over the past five years at BASF Digital Solutions I scaled a team from 8 to 16 data scientists, ML and software engineers and solution designers, and owned two production AI/ML platforms covering the full analytics journey from descriptive to predictive — delivering recurring savings above €3M. I own demand intake and prioritisation across three departments and multiple European markets, and I make the portfolio calls: what to scale, what to hand over, and what to shut down.

The technical depth is not decorative. PhD in Computer Science (Bordeaux), MSc in Artificial Intelligence, postdoctoral machine learning research, first-author publications in Q1 journals and IEEE, competitive grants as main author. I moved to industry because the most interesting ML problems are the ones that have to ship — and because a team of scientists is led better by someone who can still challenge a model choice on its merits.

Where I Operate

  • Team leadership: hiring, career paths, performance, coaching the managers who report in
  • Portfolio governance: ROI-driven build, scale, hand-over and sunset decisions
  • Production ML platforms and self-service data products at enterprise scale
  • GenAI, LLMs and agentic workflows integrated into real ML pipelines
  • Computer vision, time-series forecasting, knowledge graphs and ontologies
  • Executive communication: quantified business cases defended in front of senior leadership

Platforms & Portfolio Decisions

Four initiatives that show how I run an AI portfolio: what gets built, what gets scaled, what gets handed over — and what gets shut down.

⚙️
Scaled & transferred
Computer Vision / MLOps Platform

Owned an enterprise computer vision platform for classification, segmentation and object detection, with reusable templates deployed at cloud scale. Once mature, I transferred it to its best-fit business owner rather than holding on to it.

~€2M recurring savings · 70 templates · ~90% effort reduction for ~100 data scientists
📈
Reviewed & sunset
Self-Service Forecasting Platform

Led a self-service time-series platform giving business users forecasting and decision support without a data scientist in the loop. After an ROI and adoption review, I recommended closing it — a platform I owned — and defended that call with numbers.

~€1.5M savings from the closure decision
🤖
Funded & in build
GenAI Intelligent Labelling

Turned an image-analysis bottleneck into a quantified business case and secured internal funding for GenAI-powered intelligent labelling and workflow automation, alongside LLM integration into production ML pipelines.

€200K internal funding secured · part of €360K across five initiatives
🕸️
Enterprise standard
Ontology & Knowledge Graph Programme

Built the semantic foundation that makes heterogeneous enterprise data interoperable and machine-readable for AI and agentic systems, and the governance model that keeps it alive after launch.

20 bio-ontologies adopted as department standard · GOMO framework published

Experience

Leadership Approach

Three principles that have survived contact with a real portfolio, a real team and a real restructuring.

Build the bench, not just the backlog

Doubled the team through deliberate hiring, individual career paths and coaching of the managers who report into the role — including the hard conversations around underperformance rather than routing around them.

Decide with evidence, and be willing to kill your own product

Recommended closing a platform I owned once the ROI and adoption data no longer supported it, and transferred another to a better-fit owner — both decisions defended with numbers in front of senior leadership.

Translate between worlds

Comfortable challenging model choices with ML engineers in the morning and framing the same problem as a business case for executives in the afternoon; this is where most analytics value is won or lost.

Entrepreneurship — Proyecto Vigía · 2026 – Present

Co-founder (50%) of a B2B marketplace for a regulated Spanish services sector, currently in closed beta. I designed and built the entire platform end to end, single-handedly — backend, frontend, identity and access management, geospatial data, document processing, GDPR machinery and compliant e-invoicing — and I own monetisation strategy, fraud-risk design, infrastructure cost optimisation and the partnership protection framework.

Research & Industry Visibility

The scientific track record behind the leadership: first-author publications in Q1 journals and IEEE, industry speaking, editorial work and teaching. h-index 5 · 132 citations.

Selected publications

Development of a fixed module repertoire for the analysis and interpretation of blood transcriptome data

Nature Communications · 2021 · Q1
+
M.C. Altman, D. Rinchai, N. Baldwin, M. Toufiq, E. Whalen, M. Garand, et al., A. Ayllón-Benítez, F. Mougin, P. Thébault, R. Thiebaut, et al.

Multi-author collaboration presenting BloodGen3, a reusable framework of 382 transcriptional modules for analysing blood transcriptome data across immunological states. My contribution: functional annotation of modules using GSAn.

GSAn: a Web server as an alternative to enrichment analysis for annotating gene sets

NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics · 2020 · Q1 · First author
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, R. Bourqui, P. Thébault, F. Mougin

Presents GSAn, a web server offering an alternative to classical over-representation analysis. Clusters semantic relationships between annotation terms to provide richer, more interpretable gene-set annotations. Still live and in use.

EPPO Ontology: A Semantic-Driven Approach for Plant and Pest Codes Representation

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · 2023 · Industry
+
A. Ayllon Benitez, J.A. Bernabe Diaz, I. Esnaola Gonzalez, P.P. Espinoza Arias, B.C. McCaig, K. Hanzlik, D.S. Beeckman, T. Cools, C. Castro Iragorri, N. Palacios

Development of an internal BASF ontology representing EPPO plant and pest codes, enriched with NCBI Taxon data, plus its adoption within BASF's Agricultural Solutions division and the lessons learned.

Ontology Management in an Industrial Environment: The BASF Governance Operational Model for Ontologies (GOMO)

ISMB 2022 — Bio-Ontologies · Madison, WI · Industry
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A. Iglesias-Molina, J.A. Bernabé-Díaz, P. Deshmukh, P. Espinoza-Arias, A. Ayllón-Benítez, A. Fernández-Izquierdo, J.M. Ponce-Bernabé, S. Pérez, E. Ruckhaus, O. Corcho, J.L. Sánchez-Fernández

BASF's Governance Operational Model for Ontologies (GOMO), a framework covering the full ontology lifecycle inside a large industrial organisation. Collaboration with the Ontology Engineering Group at UPM.

Federating and querying heterogeneous and distributed Web APIs and triple stores

ISMB 2022 — Bio-Ontologies · Industry
+
T. Mendes de Farias, C. Dessimoz, A. Ayllón-Benítez, C. Yang, J. Long, A.-C. Sima

A federated data integration architecture for an industrial setup, using ontology-based data access to homogenise fragmented Web APIs and triple stores at BASF. Most queries answered in under a second.

A new method for evaluating the impacts of semantic similarity measures on the annotation of gene sets

PLoS ONE · 2018 · First author
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, F. Mougin, J. Allali, R. Thiébaut, P. Thébault

A novel evaluation methodology for semantic similarity measures applied to gene set annotation, quantifying how measure choice affects downstream biological interpretation.

Deciphering gene sets annotations with ontology-based visualization

IEEE Information Visualization (IV) · London · 2017 · First author · Invited talk
+
A. Ayllon-Benitez, P. Thébault, J.T. Fernández-Breis, M. Quesada-Martinez, F. Mougin, R. Bourqui

An ontology-driven visualization approach for interpreting gene set annotations. Invited talk — travel grant awarded by the Société Française de BioInformatique (SFBI).

Speaking & media
  • EXPOQUIMIA 2023, Barcelona — industry showcase speaker on advanced image analysis for the chemical industry, plus roundtable participation.
  • AI Cluster of the Community of Madrid — podcast guest: "Build vs Buy vs Open Source in GenAI" (2026).
  • TECNALIA — podcast guest: "Tecnología, Pasión y Futuro" (2023).
Editorial & funding

Guest Editor, Plants (MDPI, Q1) special issue on bridging the annotation gap in non-model plant species. Kempestiftelserna Fellowship and 2 competitive research grants secured as main author (KSLA, SPPS). Peer reviewer for Microorganisms (MDPI), useR! 2020 and the ISCB Student Council Symposia.

Teaching & mentoring

100+ hours of university teaching at master's and bachelor's level (Umeå University, Université de Bordeaux), covering applied functional genomics, databases and computer science fundamentals. Mentored 25+ students across four academic years, plus co-supervision of a master's thesis.

Education

MSc Artificial Intelligence

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR) · 2023–2024

PhD Computer Science

Université de Bordeaux / LaBRI · Ministerial funding (MESR) · 2016–2019

MSc Bioinformatics

University of Murcia · 2013–2015

BSc Biochemistry

University of Murcia · 2009–2013