The Heller Report: How Black & Veatch is Democratizing AI Expertise Across Its Employee Owners

Profitable AI use at the engineering and construction firm stems from an effort “to build a champion network to influence more adoption,” Chief Digital Technology Officer Mike Adams tells Martha Heller in this interview for CIO.com. These AI champions incorporate AI into their daily work, participate in community information-sharing and focus on productive use cases.

In 2022, Dr. Helmuth Ludwig, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University, and Dr. Benjamin van Giffen, associate professor of information systems and digital innovation at the University of Liechtenstein, found boards could be effective AI stewards by focusing on strategy, capital allocation, risk, and technology competence. In this interview, they discuss how to apply their research to strong corporate governance.

The orbexilum stipulatum is a plant last known to have flowered in 1881 in Ohio. It’s now among the specimens resurrected by Future Society in collaboration with scientists at Gingko Bioworks and the Harvard University Herbaria – an archive of botanical specimens. The company sequences the DNA to create fragrances from samples of the preserved plants, CNN reports. “We set out to make scents we’ve never smelled before and fragrances that were previously not possible to make,” said Jasmina Aganovic, founder and CEO of Future Society. Aganovic says the goal is to demonstrate how the latest scientific tools can apply to the beauty sector.

Heller was recently retained by Lantheus to recruit a Vice President of Information Technology for Commercial, R&D, Data, Automation and AI functions. Headquartered in Massachusetts, Lantheus is a radiopharmaceutical-focused company, delivering life-changing science to enable clinicians to find, fight and follow disease to deliver better patient outcomes. For this role, we identified Kush Misra, who most recently served as Vice President, Head of IT Business Systems, for Gilead Sciences. Misra earned a B.S. and M.S. from Banaras Hindu University and an M.S. from Pace University. Best of luck, Kush!