I run business execution, performance, and risk for Technology, Data & Operations at Truist. That’s roughly 23,000 technologists and operators at one of the largest banks in the country. My job is to make sure the division executes: the plan, the budget, the performance, the risk, and the transformation work, including the part everyone’s watching right now, which is putting generative and agentic AI to work inside a bank without breaking the rules that keep a bank a bank.
I’ve been doing some version of this for thirty years. Sixteen of them at Bank of America, where I ran operations for Global Information Security and for the CTO’s workspace organization. Four at Wells Fargo as COO for consumer technology, which meant the systems behind 5,300 branches and 11,000 ATMs, and later the group’s generative AI agenda. In between I left banking for two years to be President and CTO of a climate-tech company. Before any of that I was a network engineer at Sprint and NTT, building real-time systems where a dropped packet was a dropped call. I still think like that engineer. Downtime is not abstract to me.
Outside the bank I speak for the U.S. Department of State on cybersecurity, technology governance, and inclusive economies. I hold two U.S. patents in advanced computing. I sit on the boards of the Technology Association of Georgia and the Harlem Junior Tennis & Education Program, and I chaired the board of Out & Equal, the largest organization in the world working on LGBTQ+ workplace equality.
Here’s what I believe after all of it: technology only does good when the people building it look like the people using it. I’ve hired, promoted, and built teams on that principle for three decades. It works.
