Greater Seattle Area
Most organizations are failing at AI, not because of the technology, but because they're trying to solve an organizational design problem with a technology strategy. The bottleneck isn't your stack. It's your culture, your communication patterns, and how your people delegate decisions between humans and machines. My forthcoming book, Agentic Organizations: How AI Transforms Teams, Culture, and Work, introduces the CCD framework (Culture, Communication, and Delegation) three levers leaders must redesign before AI can deliver on its promise. This isn't about adoption curves or implementation timelines. It's about rebuilding the human operating system your organization runs on. This comes from 20+ years on both sides of the line. I've built and led engineering organizations across 109 countries at Microsoft and AWS, served as CTO at two startups, and completed doctoral research on leadership in technical organizations. I've written production code and I've advised C-suites, the gap between those two worlds is where most AI strategies go to die. PhD in Leadership | ACM Distinguished Speaker (370+ sessions, 73+ universities, 13 countries) | IEEE Senior Member | BCS Fellow | NBC-HWC I write weekly about what happens when leaders stop treating AI as a technology problem and start treating it as an organizational one. If that's the shift you're navigating, let's connect.
Lead enterprise AI strategy for AWS's largest and most complex multi-cloud accounts, working directly with CIOs, CTOs, and VPs of Engineering navigating generative AI, agentic AI, and applied AI adoption at scale. - Develop and execute competitive positioning against Azure, AWS and partner AI services, directly supporting strategic customer deals including enterprise accounts across financial services, telecom, and technology sectors - Conduct win/loss analysis and build strategic response frameworks that inform AWS's AI go-to-market approach for enterprise customers - Advise senior technology leaders on AI architecture decisions, operating model design, and organizational readiness, bridging the gap between technical capability and structural adoption - Leverage cross-hyperscaler expertise to provide differentiated competitive intelligence that directly influences deal outcomes
Led cloud-native and AI adoption strategy across 109 countries spanning Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, driving measurable business outcomes at regional scale. - Drove 140% regional attainment on Azure PaaS targets, leading 400+ enterprise deployments that cut average pilot-to-production time by 70% - Built Microsoft's global App Innovation skilling program for Solution Engineers and Cloud Architects, directly upskilling the technical sales force on modern DevOps, AI integration, and responsible AI practices - Mentored 150+ engineering leads across the region, establishing architecture review standards and technical enablement frameworks adopted organization-wide - Shaped Microsoft's competitive response to AWS and Google Cloud across emerging markets, contributing directly to regional go-to-market strategy and competitive positioning across Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
Led a global vendor team building Microsoft's Data & AI Engagement Accelerators for enterprise retail and manufacturing customers. - Designed and delivered 30+ architecture sessions and technical-sales workshops for Microsoft employees and partners, directly compressing partner solution delivery timelines - Upskilled hundreds of engineers on Azure SQL migration, Synapse analytics, and cloud-native app modernization, accelerating partner readiness across Microsoft's ecosystem - Provided hands-on architecture leadership across Microsoft Cloud Workshops in big data, app modernization, and AI, bridging the gap between reference architectures and production-ready implementations
Built and led the engineering organization from the ground up for a digital signage platform, scaling the team across three continents. - Defined hiring practices, engineering culture, and cross-timezone collaboration patterns for a globally distributed team spanning the US, Europe, and Asia - Led product strategy and technical architecture, shipping across Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Chrome ecosystems, establishing multi-platform presence from a single codebase - Drove the product from initial development through commercial launch, managing the full lifecycle from architecture decisions to go-to-market technical readiness - Built the organizational structure and processes that enabled the company to scale beyond founder-led engineering
Built and led the engineering team and partner ecosystem for an omni-channel retail cloud platform serving major retail brands. - Designed and shipped the core platform adopted by Kohl's, GameStop, and Finish Line, managing the full product lifecycle from architecture through enterprise deployment - Built the SaaS business model and advised the board on strategic positioning, pricing, and go-to-market approach - Led the engineering and partner ecosystem, managing relationships with retail technology integrators and ensuring platform scalability for enterprise-grade deployments - Identified and operationalized the insight that organizational delegation patterns, not technical architecture, were the primary determinant of successful customer deployments