Luke F. Walton
Founder & CEO, Surmado | Senior Marketing ManagerAmazon
Luke F. Walton is an AI builder and marketing operator, founder and CEO of Surmado, and currently a Senior Marketing Manager and AI Bar Raiser at Amazon. At Amazon, he oversees seller-facing paid social media across 23 regions worldwide and manages eight-figure media budgets supporting programs that deliver more than 1 billion annual impressions. He received Amazon’s 2025 “Bias for Action” Award and won AWS’s Bedrock Data Chunking Challenge, outperforming more than 100 engineers in retrieval-augmented generation design.
His career traces a consistent pattern: working at the edge of emerging technology and figuring out how to make it useful in the real world. At Google, he worked on the early commercialization of Google Glass for enterprise customers and developers. During his MBA, in partnership with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and Qualcomm, he developed wearable technology for field medics. At NAMM, he led marketing through the post-pandemic return of The NAMM Show, helping welcome more than 100,000 attendees and deliver $8 million in critical revenue recovery.
Today, Walton works across both large-scale enterprise marketing and early-stage AI product development. At Surmado, he builds production AI systems that perform real customer-facing work, including Surmado Sites, an agentic platform that allows small businesses to operate and continuously update their websites through natural language. His work focuses on how models, deterministic software, tools, permissions, evaluations, and human oversight fit together when AI moves from assisting work to actually executing it.
Walton also publishes independent research on AI ethics, responsibility, and answerability, including The Captured Oracle: Authorship and Agency in the Ethics of Answer-Engine Optimization, currently under revise-and-resubmit at AI and Ethics, and Answer Engine, an open-source reference implementation for citation-grounded answerability. He also teaches practical generative AI, agentic workflows, and responsible AI implementation.
A lifelong musician and producer who records as Scoobert Doobert, Walton has hundreds of millions of streams and releases on Sub Pop, Sony Japan, Armada Music, Indiemono, and Beformer. He lives in San Diego and spends as much time as he can in Japan.