Ahmed Zaidi is a cofounder and the CEO of Accelirate, the Sunrise, Florida, automation and AI services firm, and a former Wall Street automation engineer who has spent his career building software that takes routine work off people’s desks (Accelirate).
From Wall Street trading floors to Sunrise, Florida
Zaidi began as an automation engineer on Wall Street and later founded a consulting business focused on capital markets, leading large automation programs at global investment banks (Accelirate). He brought that experience to Accelirate, which grew from a pure RPA services shop into a firm that builds AI agents and Salesforce and MuleSoft integrations, and he led its purchases of Eshia Solutions in 2022 and Revelation AI in 2024 (Accelirate; Accelirate). In 2021 he joined the Forbes Technology Council, saying he wanted to write about automation centers of excellence, machine learning, and RPA in the cloud (Accelirate).
Eighty-hour weeks and the case for front-loading effort
In a 2025 conversation on the Wisdom From Wizards series, Zaidi, who also holds the title Chief Automation Officer, was asked whether he would rather work fewer hours and grow slowly or work much harder to succeed sooner. “Eighty hour weeks any day,” he said, explaining that putting in the hours early speeds up mastery and buys more time for family later (Caribou Strategic). On the Bot Nirvana podcast in December 2022 he talked about how intelligent automation had changed and where digital automation was heading (Bot Nirvana).