Co-founder & CTO, BlitzMetrics · CEO, Local Service Spotlight
Training up AI Builders who make the phone ring for local businesses.
Dennis Yu trains young adults and veterans to become AI Builders — directly through the AI Builder Program and through DSDT College in Detroit, where veterans earn college credit and can fund their training with GI Bill® benefits. His builders run the AI agents BlitzMetrics has built to do one unglamorous, valuable thing: make the phone ring for contractors and other local service businesses.
It’s a two-sided network — young people who need real careers on one side, local businesses that need customers on the other — supplied by the trade associations, schools, conferences, webinars, and agency partners Dennis has spent two decades building relationships with. He’s the CTO who architected the structure, and he works shoulder-to-shoulder with the leaders who share the vision.
One of 750+ conference talks across 20 countries
From Yahoo search engineer to AI agents
Dennis started as a search engine engineer at Yahoo!, building analytics on one of the largest websites in the world. From there he went on to run some of the biggest performance campaigns on the internet — over a billion dollars in Google and Facebook ad spend for brands like Nike, Red Bull, State Farm, Ashley Furniture, and Quiznos. The through-line of his entire career is the same: optimize to sales from the data and the algorithms — not impressions, not vanity metrics, the phone ringing and the cash register opening.
That’s why BlitzMetrics is now turning its courses into agents. A course teaches a human a process; an agent executes the process, documents what it did, and improves on the next run. Every audit, site build, and article program the team ships is run by agents supervised by AI Builders — and documented publicly as build logs, so clients see exactly what was done and why. It’s all about performance, measured the same way it was at Yahoo: from the data.
Why he talks about AI so much
Not because it’s the buzzword of the moment. Dennis speaks about AI because it changes what a 19-year-old with no connections can do: a young adult who can manage an ever-improving team of AI agents is an entrepreneur, not a job applicant. The AI Builder Program exists to put that leverage in the hands of young people and veterans first — learn the system, run real client work, get paid on performance, and build a name of your own.
“My mission is a million jobs — real opportunity through hands-on training. The agents keep getting better, which means the young adults who run them keep getting more valuable.”
Everyone should have a podcast
Dennis’s advice to every student and every local business owner is the same: start a podcast and interview the leaders in your world. Not for downloads — for relationships and authority. One recorded conversation, run through the Content Factory, becomes a YouTube video, a blog article that ranks on your guest’s name, clips for every social channel, and an entity signal Google can’t ignore.
He practices it himself — 236+ cataloged podcast appearances as a guest, plus the interviews he hosts — and the team has used the same system to publish hundreds of guest-honoring articles in a single day for hosts like Sean Kelly (Digital Social Hour) and Matthew Januszek (Escape Your Limits / LIFTS).
The people he builds with
Ask Dennis what he’s proudest of and he won’t name a campaign — he’ll name people. Operators like Marko Sipila, who started an agency in high school and built HVAC Quote to 300+ owners. Young builders like Cam Hazzard and Olympic speed climber Julian David. Hosts and voices like Sean Kelly, Matthew Januszek, George Leith, and Jim Klauck. Dealmakers and thinkers like Tom Shipley, Matt Bodnar, and Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross.
Each relationship gets a page here — not a logo wall, an actual page that links their work, their interviews, and what was built together, so they rank on their own names. That’s what honoring people looks like in search.
Meet the people Dennis works with →
Books & press
Dennis co-authored Facebook Nation — a textbook taught in over 700 colleges and universities — and The Definitive Guide to TikTok Advertising (2022), a #1 best-selling social media book on Amazon. His work and ideas have been featured or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, the LA Times, TechCrunch, CNN, Fox News, CBS Evening News, Adweek, Entrepreneur, and Inc., and he serves as Strategic Adviser to the AI Program at the Global Policy Institute.
What people say about him — on camera and in writing, with sources — is collected on the mentions page. The full speaking history lives on the speaking agenda.
Where to start
Local service business?
Get the free 15-minute audit. See exactly what’s leaking leads, then get the playbook to fix it.
Young adult or veteran?
Become an AI Builder — learn by doing real client work. Veterans can earn credit at DSDT College using GI Bill® benefits.
Educator or organizer?
The Content Factory curriculum is free for colleges and universities — or book Dennis to speak.
Go deeper: how Dennis works · how this site is the demo · advisory portfolio · stories · the free personal-brand playbook