Life At Protiviti

Renie Saenz

Senior Manager, Technology Consulting, Chicago

In 2020, Renie Saenz packed up his life in Japan, where he'd been stationed as a Marine Corps intelligence officer, and moved to Chicago to start a new chapter at Protiviti.

He'd spent four years in the Marines, most recently as the senior intelligence officer for Marine Air Control Group 18, a unit of roughly 10,000 people. His job was to integrate intelligence into the decision-making process for Marine Corps generals, manage intelligence architecture, and navigate regular audits from the broader intelligence community.

It wasn't the most obvious path to consulting. But when Protiviti met Renie at a Cameron-Brooks event, where junior military officers interview with corporate employers, they saw the fit immediately. "Out of about 40 or 50 officers, I was the only one they wanted to interview based solely on my resume and background," Renie recalls. "That really meant something to me."

“I’ve always been more of an operator than a builder — I know how to take a tool and make it useful for real people solving real problems.”

From Cybersecurity to Copilot Innovation

After two years of operating essentially as a one-person team inside a major bank, completing 56 vendor risk assessments largely on his own, Renie took advantage of Protiviti's sabbatical program. He traveled to Bali, Japan, and Europe. When he returned to Chicago, he had open availability on his schedule — and that's when everything changed. He discovered his next great challenge: M365 Copilot.

At the time, M365 Copilot was in its infancy, with limited licenses available. Renie began working on small training sessions and change management initiatives to help clients adopt the tool. What began as small, Microsoft-funded training sessions quickly snowballed. Renie helped a Chicago-based insurer roll out 9,000 Copilot licenses in four months, a project that demanded not just technical training but communications strategy, change management, and executive buy-in.

Real-World Wins

Renie’s work with Copilot is driven by one core belief: innovation isn’t about flashy new tools—it’s about solving real problems. He recalls a story about an IT professional at a major energy company who was drowning in a sea of emails, Teams messages, and Excel spreadsheets while managing IT tickets. With Renie’s guidance, the client created a simple Copilot prompt to collate and condense his communications into a daily report. The result? Hours saved every single day.

In another session, a client from the UK was frustrated that Copilot kept returning American spellings — "organized" with a Z instead of an S. Renie helped her craft a simple prompt to convert all outputs to UK English formatting. The fix took seconds. The client's project sponsor was on the call and later told Renie's leadership she'd been fielding that question from dozens of UK-based employees and couldn't solve it. "Sometimes innovation is just knowing how to ask the right question," Renie says.

“It’s those moments that are the most rewarding,” Renie says. “When someone tells you, ‘This is going to save me so much time,’ it’s incredibly fulfilling.”

His passion for teaching and empowering others shines through in everything he does. Whether it’s developing prompt libraries tailored to clients’ needs or leading office hour sessions to upskill Protiviti colleagues, Renie is always looking for ways to share his knowledge. “I really believe you learn best by teaching,” he says. “When you create a feedback loop, you can learn so much from the people you’re working with.”

The Leadership Thread

In the Marines, Renie's job wasn't just to analyze intelligence, it was to teach. He'd travel to a government agency, spend 40 hours training on a classified tool, then return to base and teach 18- and 19-year-old Marines how to use it. Before they briefed a general, he'd sit with them and coach them on how to present, how to speak publicly, how to command a room.

"I've always been more of an operator than a builder," he says. "I might not know how something is built on the back end. But I know how to operationalize it--how to take a tool and make it useful for real people solving real problems."

That instinct carries directly into his Copilot work. And it carries into how he mentors junior consultants at Protiviti. "If they allow me to be their mentor, I take that very seriously," he says. "I care about their careers and their success."

A Culture of Care and Collaboration

When Renie arrived in Chicago from Japan in 2020, it was Protiviti’s Military Employee Network group that helped him land. "The veterans here were my first friends in Chicago," he says. "They helped me get my first project, helped me get my feet under me. Some of them have left Protiviti, but they're still my friends. I talk to them almost all the time."

Today, Renie leads the Military ENG chapter in Chicago, paying forward the same support he received. Outside of work, he recharges with his wife, new baby and their rescue pit mix, Lovey.

Ask Renie what drives him, and his answer is simple: "When a client gives me 100 hours, that's 100 hours I get to learn a new business, a new industry, and figure out how AI can make a real impact. And then I take that knowledge and teach it to someone else." It's the same loop he's been running since the Marines: learn, solve, teach, repeat.

Want to learn more?

Explore Protiviti's culture of innovation and service; reach out to see how we can collaborate; or connect with Renie to learn more about his work helping clients unlock the power of AI.

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