Contributed by Wes McRoberts, Programs & Communications Manager, Virginia CEOs
I’ve probably used AI today. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have too.
As a Gen Z professional, AI has become part of how I work. I don’t have a formal background in marketing or communications, so I’ve had to learn through experimenting, asking questions, and leaning on people who know more than I do. One of those people is Susie Fife at Red Orange Studio, who helped build the first version of what I call my “Brand Buddy,” an AI assistant trained on our brand that helps me think through ideas, messaging, and content. She’s also been a terrific mentor along the way.
At the same time, I don’t think AI is all upside. I worry about the environmental impact of massive data centers and about workers whose jobs may change faster than they can adapt. If AI only benefits people who already have advantages, I don’t think we can call that success.
That’s why I reached out to VACEOs members and sponsors who are making decisions and figuring this out in real time, right here in Virginia.
The responses were thoughtful, practical, and a lot less extreme than most AI conversations online. Scott Crawford of Virginia 811 got back to me faster than anyone else, and his opening line set the tone: “Being excited about AI is an understatement.”
Scott Crawford: “AI is empowering”
“Philosophy, ethics, psychology, the arts, and even history have never been more important for business leaders to examine.”
Scott Crawford, President and CEO of Virginia 811, sees AI as a tool that expands what’s possible. “AI is empowering,” he told me, and he talked about being able to create things he couldn’t previously create on his own.
Years before ChatGPT became ubiquitous, Virginia 811 partnered with Virginia Tech to develop an AI model that audits locate-request tickets. “It has DOUBLED the number of potential locate request ticket errors we had been finding through traditional, random auditing.”
Scott pointed to AI’s ability to process large amounts of information. “The biggest opportunity AI presents is the ability to analyze ‘big data’ at a speed we have never witnessed, and then present insight into that data we as mere humans may take years to formulate.” Virginia 811 trained an AI auditing model on six million locate-request tickets spanning a six-year period, uncovering insights that would have been difficult for humans to find on their own and helping the team challenge long-held assumptions. Since launching in 2022, the model has analyzed millions of additional tickets and continues to evolve through machine learning.
He worries about the hype around AI pushing it in directions that get “troublesome, and possibly dangerous.” His answer was blunt: “AI is NOT something mystical and magical.” At its core, it’s a very smart tool, and tools need human governance. The technology is moving fast. The most important questions are still human ones.
He also pushed back hard on using AI as an excuse to cut staff. “AI is a tool. It is not, and will possibly never be, a true replacement for human capital.”
He closed with a reminder that feels increasingly important:
“AI must remain under human governance and guidance.”
Bryant Harrison: “You can’t stop it”
“Genuinely excited and genuinely apprehensive.”
Bryant Harrison, Founder and CEO of Seventh Wall, captured what many of us feel about AI. Bryant’s background in managed IT and cybersecurity came through in his response. “That power could help us solve problems we’ve never been able to touch. It could also go very badly. Both are on the table.”
A lot of AI conversations turn into people arguing past each other, but Bryant didn’t sound interested in doing that. “You can’t stop it. So the only real choice is how do you use it.” One example involved troubleshooting client environments: “We can feed every ticket and event across a client’s environment and it finds connections spanning months that no person would catch.”
Bryant focused on people. “When you hire me, you don’t just get me. You get me plus the five agents I built and know how to manage.” He also emphasized that expertise still matters. “A novice running a powerful agent is like someone with no training designing a skyscraper… Expertise is what makes the agent safe to use.” AI can make people more capable, but it doesn’t replace experience or judgment.
Bryant’s concerns ranged from business competition to global conflict. On the business side, he wonders whether AI could allow much larger companies to compete with the high-touch service on which Seventh Wall has built its reputation. “If AI lets much larger companies deliver the same service level for less, that’s a real threat to how we’ve built this.” More broadly, he’s concerned about the people caught in the middle of AI conflict. “At global scale, I worry that populations without access to these tools absorb the damage.”
His advice: “When you have a question about AI, ask AI.” If you’re worried about leaking data, ask the tool how to prevent it. If you don’t know how to write a prompt, explain what you’re trying to accomplish and ask it to help.
Then the cybersecurity expert in him added, “Verify anything that touches your data before you act on it. These tools can be confidently wrong about their own settings, and the settings change. Ask AI first, then confirm with whoever is accountable for your security.”
Cathy Redford: “Technology is no longer the hard part.”
“Your people strategy matters more than your tech strategy.”
Cathy Redford, Vice President of Business Development at Synergy Technical, offered a simple observation: “Technology is no longer the hard part.” Most organizations can access AI tools. The hard part is deciding what to do with them and helping people adapt.
She described herself as “optimistic and impatient in a healthy way,” then explained why. “What I feel most acutely is the gap between how fast the tools are moving and how fast organizations can responsibly absorb them.” Her advice for a small or mid-sized business was clear: “Do not bet the company on a single model. Bet on an architecture that lets you swap models as the leaderboard changes.”
Cathy uses AI both personally and operationally. Personally, she uses Copilot with Anthropic’s Opus model to build detailed financial spreadsheets, resource plans, and scenario analyses. “Work that used to eat an afternoon of formula-wrangling now takes a fraction of that.” Operationally, her team built an agent that reviews its own Statements of Work for compliance and consistency. It recently caught a fixed-fee versus time-and-materials conflict before a contract went out the door. “That’s not a novelty. That’s risk removed from the business.”
For Cathy, opportunity appears in using agents: “The move from AI that answers questions to AI that does work.” She’s seeing it firsthand with clients, moving from basic AI readiness assessments to standing up working agents in a matter of weeks, not quarters.
Her biggest concern was adoption outrunning governance. “AI doesn’t create your data problem, it exposes it.” If a company’s file permissions are loose or data has been overshared for years, AI tools will find it and surface it instantly to whoever asks. “Nobody notices oversharing until an AI tool makes it searchable. Fix that before you deploy, not after.” She’s also watching what she calls agent sprawl: who can build agents, what they can access, and who owns them.
Her advice started with security. “Secure first, deploy second.” Get identity management right, find the oversharing before AI does, and write a clear policy on approved tools. Given Synergy’s focus on data security, including earning Microsoft’s Data Security Specialization, it’s not surprising governance remains top of mind for her.
But technology wasn’t really the point. “Your people strategy matters more than your tech strategy.” She closed with a simple reminder: “You are not behind. You are almost certainly right where most organizations your size are.”
Srinivas Alladi: “AI doesn’t replace our people.”
“AI is not another IT initiative. It’s a business transformation, and it demands direct leadership involvement.”
No one emphasized leadership more directly than Srinivas Alladi, President and CEO of YottaFlex AI Technologies.
He’s seeing it with clients already: “The conversation with our clients has already moved from ‘explain this to me’ to ‘why haven’t we shipped anything?'” That got a laugh out of me.
His company uses AI throughout the software development lifecycle. “AI doesn’t replace our people. It expands their capacity, creativity, and impact.” He pointed to a practical example: “It lifts the unglamorous work of test coverage, code review, and documentation that historically got squeezed at the end of a project.”
When I asked about opportunity, his answer was simple: “Amplifying human potential.” Then he added, “AI gives a small team the reach that used to require a much larger organization.” His biggest concern wasn’t the technology. “Ignoring AI is a genuine competitive risk. But adopting it without governance, data protection, human oversight, and measurable outcomes is a different risk, and often a costlier one.”
Srinivas offered a starting point for leaders: “Pick a meaningful business problem you already measure. Start small, measure, learn, repeat.” And finally: “Build. Challenge. Tear down. Rebuild. Repeat.”
What I Took Away
When I started this article, I thought I was writing about AI. After reading these responses, I think it’s really about people.
Every leader answered my questions differently, but they kept coming back to the same idea: technology works best when it helps people do more, not less. Scott talked about governance. Bryant talked about uncertainty. Cathy talked about adaptation. Srinivas talked about leadership. Different perspectives, but a similar conclusion.
AI helps me write, brainstorm, learn, and fill gaps in my own experience. I’m grateful for that. At the same time, I still worry about energy consumption, displaced workers, and whether the benefits will be shared broadly enough.
Talking with these leaders didn’t eliminate those concerns, but it did make me more optimistic. Not because anyone has all the answers, but because the people making decisions are taking it seriously and keeping people at the center of the conversation.
Here We Grow.
