Head, AI & Data Strategic Advisory, Corvair Pte Ltd
Advisor and researcher for senior IT leaders on information strategy, use, and governance, with three decades of global work on data, analytics, and the use of machine learning to augment human decision-making.
Mark leads Corvair's AI & Data Strategic Advisory services. His mandate is to help senior leaders at regulated financial institutions translate AI ambition into durable strategy: what to build, what to buy, what to govern, and where the organization's real constraints sit between data, decisions, and operating model.
Mark's engagements at Corvair combine executive advisory, architecture reviews, and applied research. He works with clients on information strategy, analytics and ML governance, product and platform design, and the operating practices needed to run AI responsibly at scale. His work draws on three decades of designing and evaluating data and analytics systems for Fortune 100 enterprises, vendors, and investors.
He brings to Corvair the same pragmatic perspective he has taken into twenty years of keynoting, lecturing, and teaching: that the hard part of analytics and AI is not the algorithm, but the alignment between information, decision rights, and organizational behaviour.
Mark has spent thirty years working in analytics and data, starting with AI on Lisp machines at the University of Pittsburgh and autonomous robotics research at Carnegie Mellon University before moving into information technology management. His early career included DARPA and NASA-funded research, followed by IT leadership and analytics practice roles with some of the industry's pioneers of data warehousing and business intelligence.
From 2017 to 2022 Mark was a Fellow at Teradata, serving as VP R&D in the Technology and Innovation Office and, earlier, as Chief Architect for Teradata Services. As Chief Architect he led global data strategy and architecture for a 600-person consulting and pre-sales organization, consolidated design practices and methods, instituted knowledge-sharing practices that reduced new-project delivery time by 12 percent, and designed an architecture-led enterprise sales model that produced $70 million in first-year renewals. In the CTO office he created research initiatives around information discovery and navigation, embedded machine learning, and serverless databases, and drove joint research and prototyping with large customers.
Across his career Mark has held executive and management roles at vendors, in IT, and in consultancies. He has advised business intelligence, data integration, and database companies on strategy, product positioning, licensing, community management, and go-to-market. He has performed competitive intelligence and due diligence for investors and vendors across the database, analytics, and AI markets.
He has received awards for his work from the American Productivity and Quality Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and multiple industry trade associations. He is an author, international speaker, and has organized and chaired many industry conferences.
Mark has designed and architected data infrastructure, BI, and machine learning programs across many industries, including engagements with Amazon, Boeing, Cloudera, Dell EMC, GE, General Motors, Google, John Deere, Kaiser, Microsoft, Nationwide, Nedbank, Nordstrom, Sephora, Tableau, Talend, Target, ThoughtSpot, Walmart, Zion Bank, and numerous startups. He has planned and led data modernization and cloud migration efforts, developed go-to-market strategies, and built technical architectures and prototypes to launch and expand products in the analytics and data integration markets.
As a research advisor, Mark has provided R&D reviews and annual planning to productize applied research at IBM Research and SAP Business Objects. He has done hands-on R&D for vendors in the BI market, including Tableau and SAP. He has been active in the open source BI and analytics community, advising companies including MySQL, Jaspersoft, Palo, Pentaho, and Talend on strategy, licensing, product marketing, and community management.
Mark has conducted competitive intelligence assessments for data integration products at Informatica, IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS, and Microsoft, and has provided due diligence on technology and markets to investors in the database, analytics, and AI space. He has organized, chaired, and served on committees for many industry conferences, including O'Reilly Strata and O'Reilly AI, Accelerate, TDWI, and annual vendor events.
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