Eranova founder shares his journey from the classroom to AI entrepreneurship and advice for the next generation of business leaders.  

When Ethan Barnes ’22 returned to the Darla Moore School of Business, he came back with a different perspective than when he left as a student just a few years ago. Now the founder of artificial intelligence company Eranova, Barnes returned to share his experiences building a career in AI.  

For Barnes, the visit was also an opportunity to reconnect with the school that helped establish the foundation for his career.  

“I am incredibly grateful that the Moore School asked me to return and look forward to growing the relationship with the school,” Barnes says.  

Barnes graduated from the Moore School with a background in operations and supply chain, finance and data analytics. He said the combination of business and technical coursework, particularly opportunities to apply what he learned to real-world problems, prepared him for the beginning of his career.  

“The operations supply chain, finance, and data analytics concentration in the Moore School established a critical foundation going into my career in Accenture’s AI practice,” Barnes says. “That program establishes a strong business X technical foundation with real application as you enter your career.”  

Several of those experiences remained particularly meaningful as Barnes spoke with current students. He highlighted his operations and supply chain Capstone course with professor Sanjay Ahire, which allowed students to work with an outside organization and apply concepts beyond the classroom.  

“This may be the best class at the Moore School should students take it seriously,” Barnes says. “While it grants a certification, I find the real project experience with a partner organization to be one of the most important classes while I was there.”  

He also pointed to his data science coursework with Rafael Becerril Arreola and logistics coursework with Lenny Mize as experiences that helped develop his technical and business foundation.  

After graduating, Barnes joined Accenture’s AI practice, serving as a data science and data engineering resource on supply chain projects. Working across enterprise accounts required him to quickly learn new industries, business processes and technical challenges.  

“As I started at Accenture, I felt prepared to hit the ground running in my first project I was staffed on,” Barnes says.  

That willingness to enter unfamiliar environments and learn quickly became one of the central messages Barnes brought back to current Moore School students.  

“Students must be quick to put themselves in front of new problems or projects that they feel underqualified to solve,” Barnes says. “Before prescribing ‘AI’ to something, it is critical that you truly understand the problem at hand.”  

After nearly two years at Accenture, Barnes decided to pursue his growing interest in artificial intelligence more directly. He founded Eranova in January 2024 after spending much of his free time building applications with large language models.  

“Once these models began to mature rapidly, it was clear this was all I wanted to focus on in my career,” Barnes says.  

The initial idea behind Eranova was that large language models could create value for businesses beyond chatbots. After working with an initial group of clients, Barnes and his team found a particular opportunity within logistics, supply chain and back-office finance, where many business processes still require significant amounts of manual work.  

Today, Eranova develops AI agents that work within companies’ existing systems to automate tasks such as shipment quoting and booking, document processing, invoice auditing, billing and collections. According to Barnes, its agents automate more than 70% of workflow volume on average for certain tasks.  

As Eranova has grown to nearly 20 employees, Barnes has gained firsthand lessons in entrepreneurship, including the importance of staying focused on solving meaningful problems for clients rather than simply pursuing growth.   

“Grow by diving incredibly deep into how you can help your clients solve a problem — not by hiring a sales army,” Barnes says. “When you over-deliver for your clients they become your sales force.”  

He also emphasized persistence, telling students that difficult problems are not necessarily a sign that they should move on to something else.  

“Anything of significant impact proves to be difficult at some stage,” Barnes says. “Pushing through that and solving one or a small subset of difficult problems will yield much more value than pivoting every time something becomes difficult.”  

Barnes’ return comes as AI continues to become a larger part of business education and the workplace. Since graduating, he has remained connected to the Moore School and has worked with faculty members Ozgur Ince and Joel Wooten on AI initiatives.  

“The work they are doing to position the school at the forefront of AI is excellent,” Barnes says.  

During his visit, Barnes encouraged students to pair technical knowledge with a strong understanding of business. While he believes students should take advantage of AI as a learning and research tool, he cautioned against relying on it as a replacement for developing their own understanding.  

“Leverage AI to dig deep into problems and truly understand everything about them,” Barnes says. “Never outsource learning and understanding to AI.”  

For students interested in AI or entrepreneurship but unsure where to begin, his advice was to start by tackling something that initially feels beyond their abilities.  

“Pick one problem or project that seems out of reach that you would like to solve, dive incredibly deep into it until you have a solution and understand everything about it, don’t quit it until it’s truly delivered, and then scale with the foundation gained to a new problem that feels out of reach,” Barnes says.  

That message comes from Barnes’ own experience building Eranova. He described entrepreneurship as rewarding but demanding and said mentors have played an important role in helping him navigate challenges along the way.  

“Starting a business is a brutal exercise,” Barnes says. “You go through many learnings, and the ups and downs are much steeper than anything else I have experienced. I am grateful to have had a few mentors in my life that have helped avoid at least some hurdles.”  

Returning to the Moore School gives Barnes the opportunity to begin playing that role for another generation of students.  

“I hope I can serve as a resource to any ambitious students looking to follow a similar journey and guide through some of the learnings I have had,” he says.  

As Barnes continues building his relationship with the Moore School, he is also focused on Eranova’s next stage. His goal is for the company to become a leading enterprise platform for agentic AI across supply chain and back-office finance.  

“The team at Eranova is on a mission to become the standard enterprise platform for Agentic AI in supply chain and back-office finance,” Barnes says. “I look forward to continuing building an incredible team to accomplish this mission.”  

For Barnes, returning to where his own career began offered a chance to bring his experience full circle — from a Moore School student learning how to solve real business problems to an alumnus returning to help current students prepare to solve the next generation of them.