Akash Khurana | Chief Information & Digital Officer | Houston
Wesco
Wesco is a $22.4B world leader in electrical, communications and utility distribution and supply chain services, operating in 50 countries.
We are focused on transforming into a technology-enabled supply chain leader by harnessing the power of data, technology, and AI to drive operational excellence and customer value. One of our key goals is to create a secure, data-driven environment that supports innovation and leverages AI responsibly to enhance decision-making, optimize processes, and deliver exceptional value to all stakeholders. Our enterprise architecture is built on a scalable, secure, and best-of-breed framework that integrates cutting-edge digital and data solutions, enabling us to adapt quickly to market changes and continuously improve our service delivery model.
Previously Akash was at McDermott International, Baker Hughes, GE Energy, GE Healthcare and Best Buy. He also serves on the Board of Advisors of SymphonyAI. Akash holds a Bachelor of Science from Sanjivani College of Engineering and an MBA from University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Akash is completing a PhD in Business Management at the University of North Alabama.
Amit Shah | Chief Technology Officer | Chicago
Ahold Delhaize USA
Ahold Delhaize is a EUR88.6B Dutch-Belgian group, one of the world's largest food retail groups and a leader in both supermarkets and e-commerce, operating over 7,500 stores worldwide.
“What will grocery shopping be like in 2030?” is at the core of our company’s data, tech and AI strategy. In an omnichannel world we see the physical store as a digital channel, focused on experience, entertaining and ready-to-eat. Our tech supports In-store, Quick Commerce, Convenience, Sustainability, Online, fulfilment, delivery, store network, and digitizing retail operations. Our tech stack is made up of bundled solutions like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Azure and also heavy bespoke customer and ecommerce fulfilment applications leveraging in-house developed solutions.
Previously Amit was at United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Perdoceo, Redbox and Corptax. He holds a BS and a MS in Information Systems from DePaul University.
Ashish Khan | Chief Technology and Platform Officer | New York
Amway
Amway is a $7.7B global leader in health and beauty, which manufactures and distributes unique nutrition, beauty, personal care and home products across more than 100 countries. Amway’s purpose is “Helping people live better, healthier lives”.
Our focus is to create digital products and platforms to enable our Amway Business Owners (ABOs) across 100+ markets to build and scale their H+W business. Over the past three years, we have completely pivoted our Technology organization to the "products and platforms" approach for structuring our teams, technology, and ways of working – forming integrated cross-functional teams. A key strategic imperative is to continuously evolve and scale our digital experience platform through 1) Fast and reliable frictionless value discovery and shopping experiences 2) Thriving community engagement by sharing nutrition and wellbeing awareness, curated and trusted science led content, training, and guidance 3) Easy behavioral assessment frameworks, tools, and training to track progress. we are building these on a strong foundation of microservices and smart cloud architecture - and are committed to embedding Agentic AI capabilities in all our digital products/solutions and platforms.
Previously Ashish was at Estee Lauder, Staples, Digitas Publicis and Stream International. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Technology from the University of Maine.
Bhaskar Ramani | Chief Information Officer | Atlanta
Hexion
Hexion is a global producer of specialty chemicals and performance materials operating in 60 countries.
Hexion is a global leader in adhesive, coatings, composites serving industrial markets through a broad range of thermoset technologies, specialty products and technical support. Our tech footprint foundation is SAP ECC, Azure Datalake, MES and IoT TwinThread. The primary focus for the technology organization is around S&OP, advanced micromarket and supply chain optimization modelling approaching predictive, and supply chain integration with our customers. We are investing in small CoPilot based AI efforts (but more to leverage it). With discussions around S4/Hana timing on the more traditional ERP pillar side.
Previously Bhaskar was at LM Wind, a GE Vernova company, GE Gas Power, GE Energy Connections, GE Transportation, GE Aviation and GE Plastics. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical, Electronics & Communications Engineering from Bangalore University and a PGDM in Marketing and Finance from the Institute of Management Development and Research.
BK Kalra | Chief Executive Officer | New York
Genpact
Genpact is a $4.5B global professional services and solutions firm operating in more than 30 countries.
At the intersection of innovation and execution, for us - our journey with Gen AI is not just about adopting the latest technology – it's about reimagining how we deliver transformative value, driving operational excellence, and anticipating the needs of tomorrow's marketplace.
BK served in a number of leadership roles at Genpact prior to becoming CEO. Previously he was at GE, First National and PNB Capital. BK holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and an MBA from Panjab University.
Charles Lamanna | Corporate Vice President, Copilot | Seattle
Microsoft
Microsoft is a $245B technology company that develops and sells software, services, and hardware devices.
As we deploy AI within Microsoft – early numbers are promising; our AI applications are boosting employee experiences and transforming business operations, resulting in a 79% reduction in seller admin work, a 12% decrease in time to resolve support cases, and saving our sales team an estimated 95,000 hours annually.
Charles Lamanna leads the design, product development and engineering teams responsible for creating intelligent business applications and low-code platforms with generative AI. This spans products and services across Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, Copilot Studio, Copilot Apps, and Nuance Enterprise. These products include business applications for Microsoft Copilot, low-code/no-code tools, Microsoft Cloud for Industry, conversational AI, RPA, CRM, and ERP applications. Charles has held multiple leadership positions at Microsoft. Charles holds a BS in Computer Science from University of Notre Dame.
Christy O’Gaughan | Chief Data Officer | Frisco
GE Healthcare
GE HealthCare is a $19.6B medical technology company that specializes in precision care and operates in 160 countries.
With our separation, GE HealthCare has been focused on exiting GE’s data and technology environments. As that wraps up we are working on data architecture and city plan that align with insights that drive our business. We are also standing up more structured Enterprise AI strategy that will match our internal progress with our external progress. We have a mostly AWS tech stack, with SFDC, Power BI and Microsoft co-pilot. We have been moving towards a data mesh architecture and matching enterprise governance.
Previously Christy was at McKesson, Roche, Genentech and IMS Health. Christy holds a BA in Mathematics from Rowan University and a MS in Statistics and an MBA/MS in Healthcare Management and Healthcare Financial Management from Fox School of Business at Temple University.
Dan Werth | Chief Digital Transformation Officer | Atlanta
Altria
Altria is a $24B global producer of tobacco, cigarettes and medical products supporting more than 300,000 retailers across the US.
We are transforming our ways of working with an E2E process focus looking at opportunities to standardize and automate with AI and Gen AI. We have embraced this work with a few key strategic partners to help us identify opportunities and solutions. Our core is made up of SAP, Salesforce, and Azure.
Previously Dan was at St Michelle Wine Estates, MillerCoors, and KPMG. Dan holds a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from James Madison University.
Das Dasgupta | Chief Data and AI Officer | Seattle
Starbucks
Starbucks is a $36B global coffeehouse chain with more than 32,000 stores across 80 countries.
Growth will be enabled by customer experience driven by hyper-personalization stitching first, second, and third-party data. EDAP is in the works with Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, etc.
Previously Das was at Publicis Groupe, Viacom, Amazon, McKinsey, Ernst & Young and Xavor. He is also Adjunct Professor in Data Science and Advanced Analytics at USC Marshall School of Business. Das has a Bachelor of Science in Statistics, Mathematics and Physics from Presidency College, a Masters in Statistics from University of Buffalo, and holds a Dual PhD in Operations Research and Business Administration from Penn State University.
Frank Schmid | Chief Technology Officer | Stamford
Gen Re
Gen Re is a reinsurance company, a member of the Berkshire Hathaway family of companies, with $13.5 billion in net premiums written - they offer solutions to the life, health, and property and casualty insurance industries across 22 countries.
We are a cloud-based global enterprise. We were not born in the cloud, but we have migrated our applications and data into the cloud, except for a handful of mainframe applications that we operate on a Mainframe as a Service (MaaS) basis. In technology decision-making, it is cloud-first and, where we do not expect to realize a competitive advantage, SaaS (Software as a Service) first. We make data and analytics services available to the business units on a self-service basis. All data and analytics services are gen AI-enabled. We are single cloud (Azure) and we use Databricks to complement our data architecture, also from a finops perspective.
Previously Frank was at AIG, NCCI, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. He holds a BA in Economics from the University of Heidelberg, an MA in Economics from the University of Göttingen, a Doctorate in Economics and a Post-Doctorate in Finance from Leuphana University of Lueneburg.
Franziska Bell | Chief Technology Officer | London
formerly, BP
BP is a $210B integrated energy company that provides heat, light and mobility products and services across more than 70 countries.
The fusion of tech and the energy industry is not just a marriage of convenience; it’s a union of necessity.
Formerly Fran was at BP, and previously at Toyota Research Institute, Uber and CalTech. Fran holds a Master’s in Chemistry from the University of York and PhD in Philosophy and Theoretical Chemistry from UC Berkeley.
Giorgio Piazza | Chief Information Officer, Separation | Florence
GE Vernova
GE Vernova is a $34B energy equipment manufacturing and services company built through the merging and spinning-off of GE’s energy businesses, operating in 180 countries.
Across GE Vernova, we electrify and decarbonize the world, continually pushing the boundaries to enhance safety, quality, delivery, and cost efficiency. Our key goal in data, technology, and AI is to leverage advanced analytics and machine learning to optimize our products performance, improve predictive maintenance, and enhance operational efficiency. We have a long GE legacy of using machine learning and AI, and our foundational enterprise architecture is built mainly on a scalable, and secure cloud-based infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with our advanced centralized data analytic platform and core enterprise business applications (ERPs, PLM, CMS, MES … ). GE Vernova-wide AI vision is unlocking the power of Generative AI to accelerate the energy transition, empower our global workforce and deliver innovative, sustainable solutions that exceed our customer’s expectations. Our AI strategy objective is to transform how we work and the impact we have - driving greater efficiency, higher quality, faster responses, and innovation that can improve outcomes for our employees, customers and communities.
Previously Giorgio was at GE Renewables Energy and GE Oil and Gas. Giorgio holds a Master’s in Technology and Innovation Management from University of Bologna.
Gopalratnam (Gopal) VC | Chief Information Officer | Amsterdam
Philips
Philips is a $18.2B global health technology company that manufactures consumer electronics, medical imaging equipment, and household appliances operating in more than 100 countries.
Philips has been on a Digital Transformation journey over the past few years leveraging a paradigm called the Philips Integrated Landscape (PIL) where standardization has been driven through Systems of Record while customization has been provided through Systems of Insights and Differentiation. We have followed an architecture-led approach to this, using enterprise architectural guardrails built on a Best of Breed strategy. Recently the company has moved to a BU driven operating model; we have retained the architectural-led principles and guardrails while not getting stuck on standardization – standardize where it makes sense and differentiate where needed. Data has also been captured in a data lake model leveraging the medallion industry standard. Gen AI is WIP – early stages – we will only be scaling it in use cases where it makes sense and using industry standard frameworks, LLMs and models.
Previously, Gopal was at General Electric and Cisco Systems. He holds a Master’s of Science in Environmental Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA in Finance from Cleveland State University.
Irina Novikova | Chief Information Officer Transportation Solutions Segment | Zurich
TE Connectivity
TE Connectivity is a $16B global electronics company that manufactures connectivity and sensor solutions to enable the distribution of power, signal and data to advance next-generation transportation, renewable energy, automated factories, data centers, medical technology and more across 140 countries.
We have a lot of enthusiasm in our company to leverage AI as an innovation engine, about a hundred meaningful use cases were submitted for prioritization. We have set up an AI hub in Singapore to focus on AI solutions for our engineers to improve time-to-market and focus on sustainability. Approach to other functional solutions is still being defined, given the insufficient quality of data and return on capital. In parallel, we initiated a major data quality project across multiple domains. Our technology landscape is based on SAP eco-system (ERP, IBP; Success Factors, SAC), Salesforce as a CRM, PLM and CAD solutions from PTC, MES Hydra is from MPDV, AWS as a core cloud with Azure as a secondary end-user solution.
Previously Irina was at FedEx Express, Zurich Financial Services and Panalpina. Irina holds a M.S. degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and an MBA in Finance and Information systems from Indiana University, USA.
Jonny Leroy | Chief Technology Officer | Chicago
Grainger
Grainger is a $16.5B leading distributor of industrial and safety supplies operating in more than 120 countries.
We are 5+ years through a journey of diversifying our ecosystem by adding more custom-built, cloud-native, systems where we believe we can and should be differentiated, to what was a predominantly off-the-shelf (SAP and Salesforce) and on-prem landscape. We’re now layering on more ML / AI capabilities with a focus on continuous improvement in core processes, scaling internal team members, along with some directly customer-facing functionality. Our major systems cover e-commerce (~$15b annually), supply chain (30+ distribution centers), merchandizing, marketing, sales, customer service, and corporate systems. In parallel we’ve overhauled our Cybersecurity posture with particular focus on protecting operations and segmenting subsidiaries.
Previously Jonny was at Thoughtworks and held a variety of consulting roles. Jonny holds a degree in Classics, Latin and Greek Literature, Philosophy and History from the University of Oxford and a CPE in Law from the University of Westminster.
Jujhar Singh | President, Applications and Industry Clouds | Seattle
Salesforce
Salesforce is a $34.9B customer relationship management software company.
We are on a journey of deeply investing in and building industry specific data models, pre-built business processes, applications, and APIs - but on a core platform that can keep evolving across the larger footprint we serve.
Previously Jujhar was at Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, SAP Labs and Siebel Systems. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering, electronics instrumentation and control engineering from Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University.
Kiran Vankamamidi | Chief Information Officer | Los Angeles
Ventura Foods
Ventura Foods is a food and beverage manufacturing company that creates flavors and customer food solutions for the foodservice, food manufacturing and retail industry across 60 countries.
Our plan is to “Deliver an extraordinary customer experience to drive growth”. In order to achieve this goal we are focused on three pillars 1) Partner: Leverage VF’s industry expertise, food innovation, and scale to be a trusted partner 2) Accelerate: Development of processes and systems to transform VFs capabilities and 3) Inspire: Lead with VF’s culture to inspire our team. My goal here at Ventura Foods is to access the maturity of technology capabilities and chart a plan to get all required capabilities in place in the next 3-5 years.
Previously, Kiran was at Driscoll’s, Herbalife and Dell. Kiran holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Sri Krishnadevaraya University and a Master of Engineering from the University of Toledo.
Kshitij (KK) Kumar | Chief Data and AI Officer | London
Haleon
Haleon is a GBP11.3B global consumer health company that specializes in researching, developing, and manufacturing medicines, vaccines, and other consumer healthcare products and operates in 170 markets.
Haleon split from GSK and had all the process and safeguards that hold back one of the largest Pharma companies in the world. So we are one of the largest independent consumer health companies, competing on retail shelves, while still having the legacy and structure of a Pharma company. Our Goal was to provide Consumer Health for all, with our public company (a largest 20 FTSE company) goal being to Increase household penetration while expanding our portfolio and footprint through new and emerging consumer trends. Translating to Data and AI, this means: 1) understanding our current customer (even though most of our customers purchase our products indirectly) 2) understanding the trends our customers and partners demonstrate without them expressly saying so, 3) guiding our R&D and Production/Supply chain/Marketing to take advantage of these trends. Operationally we are a traditional SAP system, but our analytical capabilities are where we really excel. We are a Databricks system with excellent capabilities in pulling data from SAP into our data lakes. Power BI based analytics and GenAI as well as ML/AI using the latest toolsets on MS Azure is our path forward. OpenAI and Microsoft provide our internal ChatGPT instance.
Previously KK was at OneFootball, FarFetch, DataDon, Zalando,and Ericsson. He is also Chief Data and AI officer for DataHat AI. Kshitij holds a BE in Computer Science and Technology from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Victoria.
Naras Eechambadi | Chief Data and Analytics Officer | Charlotte
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is a EUR11.1B company which provides recorded music and music publishing, with over 3 million recordings and 4 million compositions in its catalogue.
Our Direct to Consumer (DTC) business via ecommerce, concerts and other retail channels has been our fastest growing business over the past five years. This has required better knowledge of our end consumers (fans), sophisticated segmentation and predictive models (powered by machine learning models) as well as improved abilities to upsell and cross sell fans as well as chart more effective customer journeys. A big part of our focus over the past three years has been to build a Fan360 ecosystem, gathering all relevant data about fans from varied sources in order to more effectively serve our artists and help them relate to their fans. We have rolled out a customer data platform globally, including sophisticated next best action models and are in the process of upgrading our marketing technology to become truly omni-channel across web, stores, email, text, WhatsApp, and social media. The goal is to continue to grow our DTC business at a high double digit annual rate. We are a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) shop running on BigQuery for all of our data needs. We use Vertex for most of our ML needs. DOMO is our primary BI tool, although we use almost every tool in the market (although that is being consolidated). The several hundred stores all run on Shopify. For omni-channel marketing, we are currently testing Braze. Plans for 2025 include a new global consumer consent management system and preference center as well as a host of data governance tools for enterprise data management, data cataloging and inventory, supporting supply chain management for our ecommerce business, including a product catalog across all stores.
Previously Naras was at Quaero, Wells Fargo, McKinsey and Nielsen IQ. Naras also serves on the Fit for Future Advisory Board at Novo Nordisk. Naras holds a degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, a Master of Science in management science from Northwestern University and a Doctorate in marketing analytics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Puneet Bakshi | Chief Transformation Officer, Life and Health | Toronto
Munich Re America
Munich Re is a global risk management company providing reinsurance, primary insurance, and related risk solutions. Munich Re US has approximately $6.7B in annual gross premiums written.
At our core is understanding and managing risk. The world around us is rapidly changing, and so is our understanding of risk. We need to transform ourselves to integrate big data and AI to better understand our risk. There is also an interest in improving operational efficiency. We are largely a Microsoft shop for most of our applications but have a number of specialty applications for insurance specific functions. We also have a number of in-house developed systems around risk management, claims and policy administration.
Previously Puneet was at Genpact, Concurrent Technologies Corporation and Coremotive. He holds a BASc and a MASc from the University of Waterloo (BASc, MASc) and an MBA from the Wharton School (MBA).
Raghib Muhammad | Chief Information Officer | West Chester
Resolution Life
Resolution Life is a global reinsurance company focused on life insurance with with $900M in net premiums written, operating in 5 countries.
Resolution Life US was created in 2021 with a Greenfield mindset operating under Enterprise scale Agile operating model and Cloud native technology ecosystem. Our strategy statement has been to “become a data driven, AI enabled, Agile organization obsessed with improving customer outcomes”. Our Cloud native Digital Platform was built using Data & API driven modernization strategy for our end-to-end technology ecosystem. Our Gen AI initiative’s focus is to improve efficiency and effectiveness of the subject matter expert knowledge workers across the organization. We are using Gen AI capabilities, LLMs (Large Language Models) and a set of other digital technologies to ingest thousands of documents containing knowledge about our Products, Operational Procedures and Calculation logic into an electronic repository that can serve as the basis for enabling a co-pilot type user interface for SME knowledge workers to search, compare and even process certain use cases such as reinstatements, death claims etc. Our initial focus is to apply these capabilities for Product Management teams who have deep subject matter expertise about our Products and Policyholder transactions. We see its applicability to a wide variety of teams across the organization once the foundational components of data ingestion factory, knowledge repository and co-pilot type user interface is fully functional for our Product Management teams.
Previously Raghib held a variety of technology leadership roles at AXA. Raghib holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology and a Master’s in Computer Science from Montclair State University.
Ranjit Kapila | Chief Operations Officer | Seattle
Parametric, Morgan Stanley
Parametric is an investment advisor that provides services to individual and institutional investors through financial intermediaries as part of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Morgan Stanley generates $56B in revenue in more than 100 countries.
Parametric is an investment management firm (owned by Morgan Stanley) that uses systematic rules-based investing to offer clients a highly customized solution. Key business challenges are integrating legacy products that merged into Parametric, as well as offering customization efficiently at scale while maintaining our client service differentiation. We are building an AWS cloud native investment platform, Radius, to bring together all of our products and capabilities. Radius is based on a micro-service architecture and is focused on automation, horizontal scale, and scalable exception management solutions. We use Snowflake as our Data warehouse and have a separate external facing Azure platform for external client Digital interaction and integration. The goal for Radius is to drive automation and scalable tools for exception management. We have several legacy solutions still running on-prem that leverage aspects of the cloud platform that will migrate to cloud over the next few years. As a first area of focus, we envision AI as playing a key role in client service to better understand, automate, and oversee the processing of client instructions as well as improve quality of client interactions. We have a project in-flight to deliver this in phases using OpenAI over next year. We are integrating AI into our workflow tool and testing an intermediary “AI service” to enable us to subsequently switch models or to leverage multiple models.
Previously Ranjit was at BlackRock, Citadel, RDA Corporation and ICARUS (now Aspen Technologies). Ranjit holds a Bachelor of Engineering, computer science from Punjab University, a Masters in computer science from American University and an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University.
Rebecca Scholl | VP Digital Innovation | Palo Alto
Genpact
Genpact is a $4.5B global professional services and solutions firm operating in more than 30 countries.
Previously Rebecca was at Xerox, ACS, and Gartner. She has an MBA from Community of European Management Schools, a master’s in management from Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris, and a Master’s in International Economic Relations from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, France.
Rodolfo Quiroz | Chief Information Officer | Atlanta
Coca-Cola Bottlers Sales and Services
Coca-Cola Bottlers Sales and Services supports operations for bottler owners as well as bottler-owned production cooperatives, Coca-Cola North America Operating Unit and other participating beverage partners. Coca-Cola generates $45B in revenue in over 200 countries.
What our services have in common is reliance on good data management practices and the pursuit of automation opportunities. We’ve been on an automation journey over the last 7 or so years with initiatives on RPA, Citizen Development, Data harmonization and more recently, Generative AI. Our architecture is centered on Microsoft technologies, which facilitates the integration of processes with other entities in our ecosystem.
Previously Rodolfo was as Coca-Cola European Partners, Whirlpool, GATX, KPMG Consulting and Procter & Gamble. Rodolfo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electronic Systems Engineering and an MBA from Tecnologico de Monterrey.
Sanjay Srivastava | Chief Digital Strategist & Venture Partner | Seattle
Genpact, Masagroup, Executive Technology Board
Genpact is a Fortune Most Innovative Company in America and serves over a third of the F200 in Digital Transformation. Masagroup Ventures incubates and invests in technology startups in the emerging AI and data space. The Executive Technology Board is a think tank of CIO, CDO and CTOs across the world's largest global enterprises.
We are moving into a world of AI-first services, and the pace of change is the slowest it will ever be. Already this year, the discussion has evolved from "what could we do with Generative AI" to "what should we do with Generative AI" - where are we going to reliably get return on capital; and what have we learned from the bumps on the road along the way. And our ability to transform ourselves will become the single largest driver of durable advantage for our customers, shareholders, and employees.
Previously, Sanjay was CDO at Genpact, CEO at Akritiv, before that a serial tech entrepreneur, and previously worked at FIS, Akamai, and HPE. Sanjay is a mentor at the CDL and the Intel Ignite Digital Incubators, and serves on the School of Engineering and Sciences Advisory Board at Seattle U. Sanjay has a bachelor’s from Indian Institute of Technology and master’s from the University of Minnesota.
Sigal Zarmi | Board Member | New York
ADT, Global Atlantic, GoDaddy, HashiCorp
Sigal Zarmi is an independent board member of ADT (home security company), Global Atlantic (insurance company), GoDaddy (web hosting company) and HashiCorp (infrastructure cloud company) and a senior advisor and executive coach at BCG.
Previously Sigal was at Staples, Morgan Stanley, PwC and GE Capital. Sigal holds a bachelor of science from Technion University and an MBA from Columbia University.
Simone Severini | General Manager, Quantum Technologies | Seattle
AWS, UCL
AWS is a $90B cloud computing platform company.
Quantum computing is hardly the most common topic in dinner conversations, unless you’re a physics geek, but it is becoming more and more talked about, particularly in the business and technology media. In my opinion, quantum computing is an interdisciplinary area with two equally important goals: one, to discover new science at the junction of physics and computation; two, to employ the results to build useful technology.
Simone is General Manager of Quantum Technologies at AWS, and Professor of Physics of Information at University College London. Previously he was at the Royal Society University, the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence under, and at Cambridge Quantum Computing. He studied Logic and Philosophy of Science Universita degli Studi di Firenze, and holds a PhD in Quantum Computing from the University of Bristol.
Steve Mavin | Chief Information Officer | London
Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley Institutional Securities ($23B in revenue) offers investment banking, sales and trading and corporate lending to corporations, financial institutions and high-net worth clients across 41 countries.
Currently embarking on a modernization and simplification journey by consolidating functionality onto a smaller number of strategic modern platforms executing against a comprehensive target state architecture. Considerable investment in target state data architecture consolidating operational data stores to simplify data quality, data lineage and data access requirements. We have a reasonably mature program around data analytics, onboarding data assets, workflow around access and analytics / dashboarding capabilities. With respect to AI, specifically Gen AI and LLMs current focus is on leveraging to bring operational efficiency to existing functions, technology effectiveness is seen as one of the biggest opportunities. We have several Gen AI use cases in production and many more under development, many of the strategic firmwide AI development platform components are under development, components delivering LLM evaluation and monitoring, Agent Orchestration, AI Gateways, Models and Services and Data Pipelines.
Steve has had a variety of technology and leadership roles at Morgan Stanley over 20 years. He graduated from the University of Warwick.
Ted Kummert | Venture Partner | Seattle
Madrona
Ted is Venture Partner at Madrona. Madrona Venture Group is a Seattle-based early-stage venture capital firm which manages over $2 billion.
The evolution in intelligent automation startups is striking – from ML in 2021 to early generative apps in 2022 to GenAI in 2023 and now into agentic and automation workflows in 2024 – as is the pace of change. I see more human-led AI offerings in the future.
Previously, Ted was at UiPath, Apptio and Microsoft (where he built SQL Server). He chairs the Electrical & Computer Engineering Industry Advisory Board at the University of Washington and serves on the board of directors for SingleStore. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.
Tifani McCann | Chief Data and Analytics Officer | Princeton
Otsuka
Otsuka Pharmaceuticals is a $ ¥2,018.6 billion global healthcare company that sells pharmaceuticals, functional foods, and functional beverages operating in 28 countries.
At Otsuka Pharmaceuticals (OAPI/OPDC), we are clear on our AI Ambition which has allowed us to identify and prioritize our enterprise use cases. We have also established an AI Council to help deliver against our AI Ambition and accelerate responsible AI adoption enterprise-wide. We are not starting at zero with AI adoption being plentiful at the functional level, but we are now focused on our enterprise AI enablement and starting to mobilize our enterprise technical implementation. Our key systems include SAP, Azure, Snowflake, AWS, MongoDB, DataIku, and currently replacing our data catalogue.
Previously Tifani was at Covance and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Tifani holds a BA in Mathematics from the College of New Jersey and a PhD in Biostatistics from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.
Vikas Jain | Chief Digital Officer | Seattle
PACCAR
PACCAR is a $33+B global technology company that designs, manufactures, and supports light-, medium-, and heavy-duty trucks, operating in 45 countries.
PACCARs technology journey focuses on product innovation primarily focused on software defined vehicles and Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs), Digital transformation of our sales and operations underpinned by an enterprise grade Cloud, Data and AI platform and a strong emphasis on vehicle and info security. We believe leveraging Cloud, Data and AI is essential in order for us to be competitive in a Digital age.
Previously Vikas was at Zonar Systems, Omnitracs and Qualcomm. Vikas holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics & Communications Engineering from Delhi University.
Viren Shah | Chief Digital Officer | Louisville
AGCO
AGCO is a $14 global manufacturer and distributor of agricultural equipment in more than 140 countries.
AGCO wants to provide smart solutions so that farmers can sustainably feed the world. We want to enable farmers with many onboard and off board tools that assist them in all aspects of farming with datasets like agronomy, farm data etc. that allows them to become more operationally efficient.
Previously Viren was at GE Appliances, Masco Cabinetry, Specialty Fashion Group, and Walmart. He holds a BE in Computer Science from the University of Mumbai and an MBA from the New York Institute of Technology
Executive Technology Board (c) | North America & Europe