Lucia Valenzuela

Lucia Valenzuela is the Chief Innovation Officer at James Moore & Co., where she leads firm-wide strategic transformation and turns emerging technologies into measurable outcomes. Her work sits at the intersection of vision and execution: she builds the governance foundations, automation workflows, and AI enablement programs that help professional services firms adopt new technology responsibly and at scale, and make it stick.

At James Moore, Lucia designs vendor-agnostic ecosystems rather than one-off tool deployments, guides leadership through change management, and creates standardized delivery models that close the gap between what firms say they want to do with technology and what they actually do. She treats the tech stack as a strategic asset where every tool earns its place by solving a real problem and integrating cleanly with the rest of the system.

Lucia leads two practices at James Moore: the firm's R&D Tax Credit practice, where she guides companies through the complexities of claiming the credit, and an AI Transformation Consulting practice that advises middle-market firms on AI strategy, readiness, and change management. The two reinforce each other, her tax work keeps her close to how professional services actually get delivered, while her consulting work pressure-tests her frameworks across very different firm cultures.

Before stepping into the CINO role, Lucia spent more than a decade in tax consulting and legal services. She began her career at a top 50 accounting firm, where she became one of the youngest and most profitable partners and built the credits and incentives practice by creating an offshore delivery team, implementing transparent workflows, and architecting a service model that was both efficient and scalable.

Her practitioner roots keep her work grounded: she builds technology strategies that reflect how accounting work actually gets done, not how it looks on a vendor demo. She is a frequent voice on practical AI adoption in accounting, governance-first innovation, and building tech ecosystems that scale with a firm rather than against it.

Lucia holds a JD from Thomas Jefferson School of Law and maintains an active California bar license.