EW Ed Wiley, PhD
CxO / SVP Executive | AI, Data, Analytics & Engineering

Senior executive leadership for organizations building AI into a real business function.

Ed Wiley is a senior strategic executive with the uncommon combination of McKinsey-honed business judgment and Stanford PhD-level quantitative depth. Across Fortune 50 companies, large private enterprises, public-sector environments, and venture-backed startups, he has repeatedly built and led AI, data, analytics, and engineering functions in moments that required both operational discipline and strategic clarity. He is best suited to organizations seeking a CxO or SVP-level leader who can turn significant AI ambition and investment into durable organizational capability, clearer governance, and a more credible path to commercial value capture.

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$150M+projected margin opportunity at Sears/Kmart
$7M+annual cost takeout at Delaware North
35%budget reduction in enterprise data and analytics
~10–15%GenAI cost reduction opportunity
>96%faster DEA lead identification
Portrait of Ed Wiley in a blue suit standing in front of a staircase.
Strategic executive for organizations building, governing, resetting, or scaling AI, data, analytics, and engineering as real business capability.
Selected Impact

Repeated delivery across enterprise transformation, startup execution, and AI operating-model design.

Across sectors and company stages, Ed’s work follows a familiar pattern: clarify where value will come from, reshape the organization around that reality, and then drive the technical and operational changes required to capture it.

Enterprise transformation

Delaware North — enterprise data and analytics reset for a $4.5B hospitality company

Took over a 75-person function after six years and more than $50M of prior investment had not produced sufficient business value. Re-architected the operating model, flattened management, rebuilt the platform, and reoriented the function toward delivery and adoption.

  • Executed more than $7M in annual cost takeout and reduced budget by 35%.
  • Enabled a platform rebuild that increased processing speed 5x at 85% lower compute cost.
  • Cut roughly $4M in labor spend in a major business unit and launched AI acceleration with 20 business leaders.
Commercial AI at scale

Sears Holdings — machine learning-based pricing and promotions at Fortune 50 scale

Built the company’s first centralized data science organization and partnered directly with the CEO and business leaders to establish a new price-optimization capability across product lines.

  • Scaled the team from one analyst to 41 data scientists and ML engineers.
  • Pilot categories delivered margin gains of 2.54%, 2.23%, and 6.48%.
  • Full deployment was projected to drive more than $150M in incremental margin.
Startup CTO execution

Opsis Health — rebuilt product, engineering, and ML after a failed two-year build

Stepped in after multiple contractors had consumed significant time and capital with little progress. Rebuilt the team, architecture, and delivery motion to put the business on a credible operating footing.

  • Cut more than $8M in annual contractor spend.
  • Re-architected the product from a monolith to cloud-native microservices.
  • Delivered the first product to market in less than four months.
Operational ML in healthcare

Nurx — first production ML capability for a high-growth digital health company

Built the company’s ML function and delivered NLP-based routing and prioritization models that improved clinical operations while preserving care quality during rapid growth.

  • Created ML infrastructure for production use cases including routing and prescription optimization.
  • Reduced provider response times by an average of 60%.
  • Established the cloud architecture that later hosted subsequent ML models.
Public-sector mission impact

PenLink / DEA — analytics platform that dramatically accelerated investigative lead generation

Led innovation and analytics efforts for law-enforcement software supporting agencies including DEA, FBI, US Secret Service, and US Marshals.

  • Built a cloud-based analytics solution that reduced DEA lead identification time from days to minutes.
  • Brought PenLink’s first SaaS product to market in under six months.
  • Acquired more than 200 federal, state, and local agency users in the first year.
GenAI value capture

Enterprise advisory work — GenAI productivity, org design, and operating-model decisions

Advises CFOs, CTOs, CHROs, and presidents on where GenAI can create value, how to organize for delivery, and how to avoid implementation paths that consume budget without creating durable capability.

  • Identified approximately $50M annualized hard-cost opportunity for a large financial services organization.
  • Helped leaders prioritize use cases, architecture choices, and phased implementation paths.
  • Supported AI and data transformations that contributed to DTC e-commerce growth of more than 100% and domestic retail growth above 20%.
Executive Bio

A senior executive profile defined by strategic judgment, operating leadership, and rare technical depth.

Ed Wiley combines McKinsey-honed business judgment with Stanford PhD-level quantitative expertise and a record of building, resetting, and leading AI, data, analytics, and engineering functions across Fortune 50 companies, large private enterprises, public-sector environments, and venture-backed startups.

Senior Vice President, Data & Analytics — Delaware North
2024–2025

Led a 75-person data, analytics, and labor-management organization for a $4.5B hospitality company; drove cost takeout, platform modernization, AI acceleration, and operating-model redesign.

Founder / Principal — Ed Wiley Ventures
2008–Present

Advises C-suite leaders across multibillion-dollar enterprises on AI, analytics, data strategy, operating model, organizational design, GenAI value capture, and implementation sequencing.

Chief Technology Officer — Opsis Health; Enveda Biosciences
2020–2023

Led engineering, machine learning, and product rebuilds in venture-backed health and biotech settings, including architecture redesign, team assembly, operating cadence, and fundraising support.

Vice President, Data & Machine Learning — Nurx
2019–2020

Built and led the company’s machine learning function to improve operational throughput and patient response times while scaling care delivery for a fast-growing digital health business.

Chief Innovation Officer / Chief Data Scientist — PenLink
2016–2019

Led innovation, data science, and cloud transformation for software serving leading federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies.

Chief Data Scientist, Pricing & Promotions — Sears Holdings
2015–2016

Built a 41-person data science organization and launched machine learning-based price and promotion optimization in direct partnership with enterprise leadership.

Head of Big Data Analytics — Seagate Technology
2013–2015

Built Seagate’s first Big Data Analytics team and helped position next-generation cloud and analytics capabilities as strategic enterprise assets.

Chair & Assistant Professor — University of Colorado Boulder
2004–2011

Chaired a doctoral program, led faculty and students, taught advanced quantitative methods, and built a substantial body of research, publication, and advisory work.

Senior Strategy Associate — McKinsey & Company
2001–2004

Advised clients on strategy, innovation, pricing, organization, and investment questions—forming the commercial and strategic instincts that continue to shape executive leadership style.

Leadership

Ed is the kind of executive who can enter a complex situation, earn trust quickly, and move an organization from AI ambition to operating reality.

He has done that with CEOs, CFOs, BU presidents, startup founders, long-tenured pricing leaders, engineering organizations, and public-sector stakeholders. The pattern is consistent: build the right team, establish the right governance and accountability, simplify the decision path, make the architecture choices that fit the business, and create a model that can scale.

Range

Comfortable across Fortune 50, large private enterprise, public sector, and startup environments

That breadth matters because it signals judgment that transfers across industry, scale, and organizational maturity rather than succeeding in only one context.

Team building

Repeatedly recruits and organizes high-caliber technical teams

From Sears to Seagate to venture-backed startups, he has repeatedly built teams capable of delivering when the company needs both execution speed and stronger technical standards.

Stakeholder leadership

Earns alignment from executives and skeptics alike

His work often requires influencing leaders who are accountable for outcomes but cautious about change, then helping them commit to a practical path forward.

Commercial focus

Frames AI decisions through economics, not theater

Cost takeout, margin expansion, throughput, labor efficiency, and organizational readiness are recurring themes across both operator and advisory work.

Architecture and delivery

Connects technical choices to execution reality

Comfortable operating from LLM strategy and vendor selection down to cloud architecture, microservices decisions, and production machine-learning infrastructure.

Executive presence

Combines Stanford PhD-level rigor with McKinsey strategy fluency

The result is a leader who can engage at board, C-suite, and technical levels without sacrificing either substance or commercial clarity.

Thought Leadership

Ed brings the rare combination of executive operating experience and the public credibility to shape how senior leaders think about enterprise AI.

He has built and led AI, data, analytics, and engineering functions; taught executives how to approach data science and generative AI; chaired a doctoral program; and developed a substantial body of speaking, teaching, and published work. For organizations evaluating senior leadership, that record signals not only depth of expertise, but the ability to align boards, C-suites, and technical teams around consequential decisions.

Academic depth

Stanford PhD/MS with experience leading doctoral education

Brings unusual quantitative depth, supported by leadership of a doctoral program, advanced teaching in statistics and machine learning, and a substantial body of research and publication.

Field perspective

Long view on enterprise AI, from traditional ML to generative AI

Has worked with AI as researcher, consultant, executive, professor, advisor, and founder—bringing a perspective that is both historically informed and commercially practical.

Contact

Relevant to organizations seeking a CxO or SVP-level leader for AI, data, analytics, and engineering.

Ed Wiley brings the uncommon combination of strategic judgment, technical depth, and operating leadership required in moments of consequential change. He is particularly well suited to companies that have made meaningful investments in AI or data and now need a senior executive who can convert that investment into stronger organizational capability, improved operating performance, and durable enterprise value.

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Emailed@edwiley.ai
LocationBoulder, Colorado
LinkedIn/in/EdWileyPhD
Relevant for CxO / SVP searches, enterprise AI transformation, board-level advisory, and investor-backed scale-ups