Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith is the Senior Partner of 021:Events and CEO of Smith Horn Group, a vertically integrated product studio delivering end-to-end product discovery and agentic AI development for technology companies.

Ryan has delivered agentic AI workshops for product and engineering teams at Boeing and Asana, and led fractional product engagements at Cloudinary, taking their Shopify ecosystem strategy from discovery through validated product. As Product Lead at Shopify, he built and shipped improvements to image, video, and 3D media technologies that generated a $10 billion impact across the platform. His work in AI-driven retail technology includes production deployments with luxury platforms including LVMH and Farfetch.

He is the creator of Skillsmith, an agent-native skill builder designed to help teams create, secure, and optimize agent skills for production agentic systems.

Ryan is an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where he teaches product discovery, rapid prototyping, and go-to-market strategy. He brings a first-principles approach to every engagement, combining hands-on product leadership with deep AI fluency. He does not just advise on what to build. He builds alongside teams and stays engaged until the work ships.