Sol Rashidi

Why organisations work with Sol Rashidi

• She has personally led AI and data deployments inside Estee Lauder, Merck, Sony Music, Royal Caribbean, and Amazon Web Services, so the advice is field-tested rather than theoretical.
• She wrote Your AI Survival Guide (Wiley, 2024), the practical deployment playbook that boards and CIOs have started to use as a reference text for moving past pilots.
• As Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center, she is shaping AI policy thinking at the level boards now have to engage with.
• She talks credibly to two audiences in the same room: technical leaders who need the architecture to be right, and executive teams who need the commercial and workforce implications spelled out.
• Her current role as Chief Strategy Officer for Data and AI at Cyera keeps her live inside the AI security and governance conversation that boards are being asked to own.

Biography highlights

• Chief Strategy Officer for Data and AI at Cyera since April 2025.
• Senior Fellow 2025 to 2026 at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
• Author of Your AI Survival Guide (Wiley, 2024), a Top 100 AI book of 2024.
• Former four-time Fortune 100 C-suite executive: Estee Lauder, Merck, Sony Music, Royal Caribbean.
• Division Head of Technology, Startups, North America at Amazon Web Services.
• Holds 10 patents in data and AI; named Forbes “AI Maverick of the 21st Century” and to multiple Top 100 AI Leaders and Top 50 Women in Tech lists.

Biography

Most enterprise AI programmes look identical from the outside and fail in different ways on the inside. The strategy decks are confident. The pilots run. Then the operating model, the data foundation, or the workforce conversation breaks the deployment before it scales. Sol Rashidi has spent a career on the operator side of that problem, and now advises the boards and executive teams who own it.

She helped launch IBM Watson in 2011, then became the first Chief Data and AI Officer in a Fortune 500 company. Across the next decade she ran data, analytics, and AI organisations as a four-time C-suite executive at Estee Lauder, Merck, Sony Music, and Royal Caribbean, and led the Startups technology division for Amazon Web Services in North America. The result is a practitioner record measured in 30 to 200+ AI deployments inside large enterprises, not in conference panels.

That record is now packaged in two formats. Your AI Survival Guide (Wiley, 2024) is the playbook for non-technical leaders running real deployments, structured around strategy, use case selection, design, implementation, and long-term operations. As Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, she is developing an ontological framework for AI policy aimed at aligning government and business on what the technology actually is and how it should be governed.

Her current operating role as Chief Strategy Officer for Data and AI at Cyera keeps her inside the AI security and governance debate that boards are now expected to lead. She holds 10 patents, has been named Forbes “AI Maverick of the 21st Century,” and has been recognised across multiple Top 100 AI and Top 50 Women in Tech rankings. The reason senior buyers keep coming back is simpler than the credentials: she has shipped this work, and she will tell a room what actually happens when you try.

Key speaking topics

• Enterprise AI deployment and operating model
• AI governance, security, and responsible deployment
• Workforce redesign in the age of AI
• Data strategy and enterprise data readiness
• AI for boards and executive teams
• Post-AI organisational design
• Innovation discipline inside large enterprises

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees deciding how to own AI strategy and risk
• CDOs, CIOs, CTOs, and Chief AI Officers moving from pilots to enterprise deployment
• CHROs and transformation leads redesigning the workforce around AI capability
• CISOs and risk leaders building AI governance and security frameworks

Audience outcomes

• A clearer view of where their AI programme actually sits on the path from pilot to enterprise deployment.
• A workable mental model for AI governance and security at board level, not a compliance checklist.
• A direct read on what the workforce conversation looks like once AI starts to land in operations.
• Specific deployment lessons drawn from named Fortune 100 environments, not abstract case studies.
• Confidence in deciding what to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone.