Enterprise AI is not failing for the reasons most leaders think. The technology works. What breaks is the operating model around it: the governance, the authority structures, and the organizational discipline that decide whether a promising pilot ever becomes a system the business can trust.
That gap is where I have spent my career.
I am an enterprise AI strategist, author, and consultant. For more than thirty years I have led complex global programs for Fortune 500 organizations, delivered on time and on budget, in some of the most heavily regulated environments in business. For the last decade that work has centered on AI, from machine learning in financial crime compliance through today's generative and agentic systems.
My foundation is in financial services risk and compliance, more than twenty years of it, in-house and as a consultant, for institutions including HSBC, Barclays, Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, and Standard Chartered. Regulated finance taught me the disciplines enterprise AI now demands: clear lines of authority, auditable controls, and human accountability.
I served as Field CTO and Enterprise Architect at ServiceNow from 2021 to 2026, leading enterprise platform strategy and AI implementation across a portfolio exceeding $100 million in annual contract value.
Today I advise boards and executives independently. I teach in the Strategic AI Program at the University of San Francisco School of Management, where I also sit on the advisory board, and I chair the board for Strategic AI at the ZAI Institute. My book, It's Not About AI, makes the argument at length: the hard part was never the model.
I came to this work along an unusual path. Long before AI, I was, and remain, a collector and historian of photography. Over the years I assembled a collection of more than ten thousand prints, including Pulitzer Prize-winning images and a significant body of work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Jacques Lowe, the photographer who documented the Kennedy years. That collection now resides at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
The interest began with a family member who served in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, and it shaped how I think.
A collector learns to separate signal from noise, to recognize what will endure long before the market agrees, and to keep the long view through cycles of enthusiasm and panic.
I bring the same temperament to enterprise AI. I have watched technology waves crest and break before. I am rarely alarmist, and rarely impressed by novelty for its own sake.
Away from the work, I like to cook and continue to collect fine art. The thread runs through all of it: respect for craft, and patience for the work that quality requires. That is the posture I bring to clients. Not the loudest read on AI, but the most useful one.
Copyright © 2026 The Paris Group LLC. All rights reserved.
The Paris Group LLC