Kalles Group Smart Cookies: AI Ambition is Outrunning Execution

There's no shortage of AI ambition right now. Execution is where it gets hard.

Organizations everywhere are investing in AI, launching pilots, setting strategies, and asking teams to move faster. But between the executive vision and an AI capability that actually works at scale sits the messy part: delivery, adoption, governance, security, risk, and the realities of organizational change.

For our next Smart Cookies, we're bringing together four senior leaders who sit at very different points in that process for a candid conversation about what it actually takes to move AI from ambition to execution.

Meet the panel

Kylie Alfano, Senior VP & COO, Tableau

Kylie is Senior Vice President and COO at Tableau, the analytics company acquired by Salesforce in 2019, where she oversees operations across the business. She has spent thirteen years at Tableau, rising through HR operations, business operations, and global sales strategy and operations before stepping into the COO role. She studied economics at Macalester College and the London School of Economics.

Tom Van Buskirk, Executive VP of Technology & Engineering, PitchBook

Tom is Executive Vice President of Technology and Engineering at PitchBook, where he's led technology teams since 2021. He brings more than 20 years of experience building mission-critical software, spending much of his career guiding product, technology, and engineering organizations. At PitchBook, he oversees all of Engineering & Technology, leading teams that are reimagining private capital market intelligence — designing platforms where insight is instant and workflows earn trust. He's passionate about building collaborative, curious teams that thrive on solving real customer problems.

Andy Stetzler, Enterprise AI, Gates Foundation

Andy leads enterprise AI work at the Gates Foundation, where he has spent seven years across program management and emerging technology. He led the foundation's initial rollout of ChatGPT and Copilot, including onboarding, adoption, and training. His current focus spans emerging technology and enterprise architecture, with earlier work in machine learning and knowledge management.

Lee Peterson, Deputy CISO & VP of Technology, Nordstrom

Lee is Deputy CISO at Nordstrom, where he turns cybersecurity strategy into operational programs that protect the company's brand, data, and platforms at scale. He joined Nordstrom from Microsoft, where he spent five years as Principal Director for Securing Emerging Technology, leading the security program for Microsoft's AI and low-code platforms including Copilot and Copilot Studio. Earlier in his career he led global cybersecurity engineering at Starbucks and worked in information security at the Gates Foundation

Together, they bring perspectives spanning strategy and operations, technology and delivery, enterprise AI enablement, and security and risk.

What we'll get into

This isn’t an AI 101 conversation, and we're not making predictions.

Instead, we'll dig into where organizations are discovering that the hard part of AI isn't actually the AI. Why do promising pilots struggle to scale? How do you balance speed with security, governance, and risk? What does real adoption require beyond giving people access to new tools?

Most importantly, we’ll hear what these leaders have learned by doing: what’s been harder than expected, what’s actually working, what they’ve changed their minds about, and what they’re still figuring out.