Principals

Blaine Mathieu, founder.

Blaine Mathieu has spent three decades turning emerging technology into business value. He has been a multi-time CEO, CMO and CPO, at public technology companies and at enterprise and industrial-software startups, with global partners including Ford, SoftBank, ABB, TotalEnergies and China State Grid. Before that he was a Gartner analyst, where the work was vendor-neutral by design.

He founded The River Group to guide executives through the decisions agentic AI is forcing, so that they reach decisions they own in days rather than months: how far to take each outcome over the next 12 months, from not yet through retrofit to reimagine, and who owns the first moves. The firm keeps the neutrality of his Gartner years. It has no AI platform to recommend and no implementation to sell.

He is the author of The River Doesn't Wait, where the firm's method was first published, and which the CEO of ABB, the global technology and engineering company, endorsed. His second book, Meet Them on the Water, on how an organization faces its market in the age of agentic AI, publishes in fall 2026.

His first published work appeared in 1990, in The Age of Intelligent Machines by Ray Kurzweil, the inventor and AI pioneer. Today he runs The River Group itself on agentic AI, with systems he built for the firm's own work. He has been speaking to executive audiences about emerging technology for more than 25 years, and in February 2026 he hosted the Post-Industrial Institute's summit on autonomous organizations at the Stanford Research Institute. He is based in the SF Bay Area.

Connect with Blaine on LinkedIn.