Evan J Schwartz,

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Buddy

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Evan J Schwartz is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Buddy, the marketplace and trade operating system built for scrap metal recyclers by people who have run them. He joined founders Stuart and Lisa Kagan in October 2026 and owns Buddy’s technology and product as the company moves from a founder-led startup into its first enterprise rollouts.

 

A scrap yard runs its operations on ERP and scale systems and runs its trading on texts, emails, and spreadsheets. Buddy exists to close that gap, and Evan watched it from the other side of the table during eight years at AMCS Group, where he helped build and integrate the platform software that runs some of the largest scrap metal recyclers in the world.

 

He arrived at AMCS through its August 2018 acquisition of DesertMicro, where he had been Chief Technology Officer, and went on to lead technology and sales engineering, solutions engineering, and then professional services for North America. As Chief Enterprise Architect, he set the technical direction of the AMCS Platform and ran the integration of acquired companies. As Chief Operations Officer for North America, he was responsible for customer success, strategic accounts, professional services, and product delivery across the region. As Chief Innovation Officer, his last role there, he was accountable for getting new solutions into production across every business unit, including the company’s AI programs.

 

Before AMCS, Evan spent ten years as Vice President of Technology at Baywood Technologies, where he built a cloud-based ERP for the forestry and paper industry well before cloud was the default for enterprise software. Earlier, he architected Adept, the ERP and trading-room system at Infinite Energy that carried the natural gas company from $80 million to more than $500 million in annual revenue. He started his first company, Locatha Industries, at sixteen.

 

He is the author of People, Places, and Things: A Framework for a Pain-Free ERP Implementation, an Amazon bestseller published through Forbes, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council. Through OurKarma LLC, he publishes the Customer Journey Framework, a ten-phase method for ERP implementation, and the AI Steward, Operating and Adoption Model, his case that AI earns its place in a business when it carries the routine work for a person who stays accountable for the decisions, a stance he calls Person Plus AI.

 

Evan teaches at Jacksonville University as an Adjunct Professor, where his Fall 2026 course, CS302 AI Engineering, is the classroom test of his Structure-First approach to building software with AI. He serves as Chair of the Advisory Board for the university’s Department of Computing Science and Center of Cybersecurity, and volunteers each year in its student mock interview program. He holds an MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology and a master’s degree in computer science from Full Sail University, and is pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at National University.

 

He lives in St. Augustine, Florida, with his wife, Lisa, and their dog, Peanut. Their two sons work in technology and design.