Carina Reyes, Vice President of Cloud COE and Platform Engineering at Albertsons
Carina Reyes is an accomplished executive leader with a proven track record of guiding organizations and clients through comprehensive transformation across digital, cloud, culture and technology. She has held impactful global P&L/GM leadership roles, driving the growth of consulting, design and technology practice delivery and global IT services. With a passion and commitment to growing businesses and catalyzing change initiatives, Reyes has become a trusted advisor and technology executive leader in a variety of industries, including high technology, healthcare, consumer products, real estate, hospitality, construction, insurance and nonprofits . profit department. Currently, she serves as Vice President of Cloud COE and Platform Engineering at Albertsons, where she is committed to implementing artificial intelligence and becoming one of its early adopters.
Please share your career journey and current roles and responsibilities with our readers.
I am a technology veteran with 25 years of experience in IT organizations and professional services. I currently work at Albertsons, a $74 billion retail company focused on bringing the joy of food to consumers. Albertsons, Inc owns more than 20 brands, including Safeway and Tom Randall, distributed nationwide. I joined Albertsons 21 months ago as their Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) leader and cloud platform engineer. My organization provides services for engineering application teams to successfully deliver their products in our cloud environment. The cloud COE covers product transformation, cloud governance, financial operations (FinOps) cost optimization, asset management and product management office oversight. In addition to my COE responsibilities, I also lead the cloud platform engineering team. This involves overseeing cloud infrastructure, containers/compute, database, external (b2B) and internal integration services. I led the cloud transformation journey, moving all of our workloads from two data centers to the cloud.
I have held various senior executive roles at Ernst & Young, JLL and Xerox. At all three companies, I sponsored and/or led the transformation of professional services teams while delivering significant transformation for clients. Prior to joining these companies, I spent 13 years at Cisco in customer-facing and internal roles driving new innovations in networking, collaboration, and storage. Before joining Cisco, I worked at several startups.
A strong leader believes wholeheartedly that their success depends more on the collective strength of their employees, leaders, and teams.
Can you share some of the challenges you’ve noticed in the market?
The current business environment requires unprecedented speed and agility. I’ve worked in IT and as a consultant, and I’ve seen firsthand the important role played by companies that can scale quickly in response to market dynamics. Notably, those businesses that leveraged cloud technology demonstrated resilience, seizing opportunities for expansion and contraction, emerging as winners during the turbulent COVID-19 times.
As with any transformation or large-scale change, there are trade-offs. Cost management is very different for companies moving to the cloud. Unlike the predictability of data center operations, cost control in the cloud brings greater surprises. Businesses need to focus equally on transformation and governance, and invest in policies, controls and automation to prevent costs from spiraling out of control at the speed of convenience. Artificial intelligence can play an important role in financial operations and cloud governance.
The emergence of artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity. While AI promises significant advantages, uncontrolled and unmanaged AI also brings a new set of challenges. Establishing appropriate governance and controls will determine the success or failure of these efforts. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence over the next five years will make products easier to use and humanize digital experiences faster than ever before. With the advent of the artificial intelligence era, the scale and speed of change will reach unprecedented levels, and governance will play a more important role. Leaders need to be ready to jump on this rocket ship.
What strategies have you adopted to adapt to these changes?
I find that getting people excited about the future creates the most productivity. By regularly connecting with customers, our leaders can anticipate and prepare for a platform-centric approach, a self-service shared services model. Doing this allows us to give them the speed and agility they need.
Through consultative collaboration, we drive short iterations to facilitate prioritization and acceleration. When we anticipate change, whether it’s the emergence of technology, process or artificial intelligence, my approach is to dig in by learning first and setting an example within my team. Learning should be seamlessly integrated with experience. For example, introducing new technologies such as Gen AI requires piloting small use cases with a limited group of people.
In the evolving technology delivery landscape, a human-centered approach is becoming increasingly important. My agile approach goes beyond technology and product development. It includes people and leadership. Managing with a human touch includes providing upskilling that matches their schedules and igniting excitement through on-the-job experiences and timely celebrations.
How do you see the future of this industry?
Going forward, the pace of change will accelerate. Multi-cloud, digitalization of health, food, agriculture, mobility (cars, trucks, agricultural machinery, etc.) is rapidly expanding to include AI capabilities.
For example, the highly critical thinking and analytical skills often attributed to our industry’s “rock stars” are being democratized through Gen AI. This will create better correlations and derive intelligence from historical data. As a transformative force, artificial intelligence presents both opportunities and threats. Artificial intelligence has sped up processes and decisions, but is still years away from what we imagined in the movies. My bet is that with the massive amounts of data and machine learning that have been around for the past decade, tech support will shift as AIOps becomes a commodity in less than a few years. Mastering the delicate balance in AI applications is critical and relies heavily on good data and machine learning. Good data applications can lead to incredible advances, but the opposite can be worrisome, such as misusing health information to customers who receive incorrect predictions, and outdated information providing the wrong technical solutions. In reality, these challenges are no different than those of today. But artificial intelligence will be scrutinized and judged more closely.
Likewise, new market concepts that integrate our wearable health data and lab reports with our grocery shopping can help consumers focus on health. One example is that a person with prediabetes at the grocery store may be advised to purchase items that may be detrimental to his/her health, or may be given a healthier grocery list or recipes. Today, health data looks very different in labs, doctors’ offices, and hospitals. Imagine a day when everything is connected, analyzed, and provides guidance for our overall health in a more personal and customized way, based on better science.
What advice do you have for your peers?
Cloud transformation and the impact of artificial intelligence continue to reshape how we work and live today. Our ability to react and act quickly requires different leadership skills.
1. Need for speed. It requires a new way of thinking that sees speed as a way of life, new ways of working (recruiting, learning, developing, etc.) and ways of solving problems.
2. Participate in the AI transformation journey as early as possible, starting with continuous learning and preparation.
3. Test success by allowing failure to enable next-level leaders to make decisions scientifically, take risks, and apply artificial intelligence iteratively.
4. Focus on the collective team: A strong leader wholeheartedly believes that their success depends more on the collective strength of their employees and across teams than on individual abilities. The era of siled decision-making has been replaced by the need for close collaboration. The emergence of the cloud has played an important role in this transformation. Cloud teams and application teams must work closely with their peers. Things have changed, and qualities that were once considered admirable are now essential foundations for success. The focus should always be on people – your own team and colleagues – and how you can connect and collaborate with them effectively.
5. Celebrate Often: The speed at which we are expected to move can lead to exhaustion, which can lead to health challenges or burnout. Take time to celebrate results, allow for necessary breaks to rejuvenate and reward your team for success.
