Welcome to my professional website. I am Cody Sullivan, Ph.D., an AI researcher, builder, and operator. My work rests on one idea: what people say and write is some of the most useful information an organization has, and AI finally makes it possible to read all of it.

Academic Background

 

I earned my Ph.D. in Business Administration in 2026 from the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. My dissertation was supervised in the Reiman School of Finance. I also hold an M.B.A. from Eastern Illinois University and a B.S. in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences from the University of Illinois. Together these degrees gave me a scientist's training in method and a business grounding in finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship.

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Research Focus

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My research looks at how the language leaders use reveals what is happening inside their companies. For my dissertation, I built an AI research pipeline covering tens of thousands of earnings calls and millions of sentences of executive language from S&P 500 companies between 2010 and 2025. Key areas include:

• AI and Natural Language Processing: Using dictionary methods, word embeddings, and transformer language models such as FinBERT to measure meaning and tone across large volumes of text.

• Corporate Culture Measurement: Testing whether how a company talks about its values carries information that simply counting mentions of those values misses.

• Sentiment Analysis: Separating real signals from a company’s general optimism on a given day, a problem anyone scoring customer comments or employee surveys runs into.

• AI Talk and Firm Value: Tracking how leaders’ discussion of AI related to company outcomes before and after ChatGPT. The link was there early and faded once everyone started talking about AI.

• Finance and Data Analytics: Linking language measures to company financial data and testing them with panel models and out-of-sample validation.

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Past Research 

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​My initial research endeavors were rooted in biology, where I developed a strong analytical mindset and a methodical approach to scientific inquiry. This background has uniquely positioned me to approach business research with a rigorous and innovative perspective. The transition to business research has allowed me to apply my analytical skills to explore complex business phenomena and contribute to the fields of innovation and marketing.

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Professional Experience

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I have more than twenty years of experience in operations, entrepreneurship, product innovation, and data analytics. I am chief operating officer of Next Generation Schools, a multi-site company with about 230 employees, where I have worked since 2005. I founded three companies (Bad Boy Calls, TTEK, and Cast n Catch) and led a forty-person innovation team at Brunswick's I-JET Lab. I am a named inventor on two issued U.S. patents assigned to Brunswick Corporation, and I was principal investigator on a National Science Foundation SBIR award.

Today I run Groundwork AI, the AI and analytics practice of TTEK. We build custom AI systems, data pipelines, and document analysis tools for operating companies, and I teach their leaders to run the tools themselves.