Lucas Peterson is the owner and managing member of Hayloft Advisors, LLC. For over 25 years, he has applied emerging technologies to tackling strategic challenges in the private and public sectors, in political campaigns, and for purpose-driven not-for-profits.

Luke’s award-winning and/or impact-generating career highlights have entailed:

• Advising senior congressional, military, and other executive-branch government leaders under both Democratic and Republican administrations, both from within and from outside government.

• Advising C-suite Fortune 50 clients (e.g., Ford, Bank of America, Intel, Pepsico) as an innovation leader with two global publicly-traded business consultancies.

• Building and leading the U.S. State Department’s communications-focused social science and data science-driven global media research and analytics offices as a Deputy Assistant Secretary under a non-political technology fellowship appointment, overseeing ~80 staff, $25+ million annual budget.

• Developing new consumer-data-driven approaches to strategy development and impact measurement for public relations and marketing programs through creative application of holding companies’ interagency data assets at IPG and WPP.

• Coordinating relationships among the U.S. State Department, the White House, the military, and intelligence community on policy areas of critical interest.

• Driving adoption of emerging cloud computing technologies to house and analyze massive voter and consumer datasets for audience segmentation and micro-targeting – doing “Big Data” before it was a buzzword.

• Leading the adoption of geospatial machine learning techniques to evolve political redistricting.

• Advising on the largest-scale reorganization of the U.S. State Department in 25 years, serving as a senior leader through a complex merger and period of intense organizational turbulence.

• Providing empirically-informed advice actioned by the White House on major policy initiatives including Russia’s War on Ukraine, the U.S. Southern Border, Israeli-Palestinian affairs, threats from North Korea and Iran, Chinese encroachment on allied territory in the South China Sea, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Oversaw the global advertising campaign responsible for informing Americans stranded overseas on their options for returning home with government assistance during the suspension of global travel in the 2020 pandemic.

• Guiding Barack Obama to his historic 2008 primary win through efficient resource allocation derived through a statistical simulation of DNC delegate vote scenarios.

• Advising dozens of U.S. state and local elected labor leaders on technology adoption and managing tailored delivery of CRM services for membership management.

• Establishing the Science and Technology office in the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center in 2018, applying emerging technology to identify and combat disinformation efforts from ISIS and U.S. global adversaries.

• Developing bespoke, data-informed consumer and voter audience engagement strategies for a variety of clients in public and private sectors on six continents to move markets and governments and drive billions of dollars in commerce.

• Traveled to overseas locales with complex U.S. relationships (e.g., Russia, China, Iraq) to represent and advance U.S. government and allied interests.

Through Hayloft, Luke now advises clients on a range of matters from geopolitical risk to emerging technology and AI adoption to organizational change and business strategy to audience engagement planning.

Luke holds a Master’s in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA and a Bachelor’s in Political Science from Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He now resides in Washington, DC and West Virginia.