The Heller Report: Roundup of New CIOs for August

Among this month's highlights: Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy hired Neal Sample, executive vice president and CIO at Walgreens Boots Alliance, to be chief digital and technology officer; energy provider Southern Company named Hans Brown, formerly executive platform owner for loans enablement at financial services company BNY, as its new executive vice president and chief information technology officer; and Love’s, a national travel stop and convenience store operator, appointed Tim Langley-Hawthorne, most recently the executive vice president and CIO at Hertz, as CTO.

The transformative nature of AI can create a sense of exceptionalism. But AI is not magic; it is a collection of technologies that can be applied to solve real problems, writes Tsvi Gal, CTO and head of enterprise technology services at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In this article, Gal outlines how boards of directors can exercise discipline when evaluating AI investments.

How many times does “pizza” appear in New York? Would you believe 111,290? That – and every other legible word on a street sign, bus billboard, truck, shop window, even graffiti – is part of a dataset of Google Street View images created by Yufeng Zhao, a media artist who fed millions of publicly-available panoramas into a program that transcribed text from the visuals. Data visualization specialists at The Pudding created a web story using the data so we can search for ourselves. Did you say fuhgeddaboudit? The phrase appears in 154 city spots. Or, you might add, if you know, you know (37 matches).

Heller was recently retained to recruit a Chief Information Officer for Vertiv. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, Vertiv is a global leader in critical digital infrastructure for applications in data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial environments. For this role, we identified Mike Giresi who most recently was Chief Digital Officer at Molex. He previously served as Chief Digital & Technology Officer at Aramark. Giresi earned a B.A. from Seton Hall University and an Executive MBA from Saint Joseph’s University – Erivan K. Haub School of Business. Best of luck, Mike!