Extreme Innovation With AI: Stanley Black and Decker's Mark Maybury

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:01)
AI applications involve many different levels of risk. Learn how Stanley Black & Decker considers its AI risk portfolio across its business when we talk with the company's first Chief Technology Officer, Mark Maybury.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Today we're talking with Mark Maybury, Stanley Black & Decker's first chief technology officer. Mark, thanks for joining us. Welcome.

**Mark Maybury** (1:10)
Thank you very much for having me, Sam.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:12)
Why don't we start with your current role? You're the first chief technology officer at Stanley Black & Decker. What does that mean?

**Mark Maybury** (1:17)
Well, back in 2017, I was really delighted to be invited by our chief executive officer, Jim Lurie, to really lead the extreme innovation enterprise across Stanley Black & Decker. So I get involved in everything from new ventures to accelerating new companies to fostering innovation within our businesses and just in general, being the champion of extreme innovation across the company.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:43)
You didn't start off as a CTO of Black & Decker. Tell us a bit about how you ended up there.

**Mark Maybury** (1:48)
It was a really a very, if you look at my history, you know, how did you get interested in AI? I mean, AI started when I literally I was 13 years old. I vividly remember this.
It's one of those poignant members. In 1977, I saw Star Wars.
And I remember walking out of that movie being inspired by the conversation of robots, R2D2, C3PO, and the artificial intelligence between the human and the machine. I didn't know it at the time, but I was fascinated by augmented intelligence and by ambient intelligence, you know, that they had these machines that were smart and these robots that were smart.
And then that transitioned into a love of actually understanding the human mind. In college, I studied with a number of neuropsychologists as a FEMEC scholar at Holy Cross, working also with some Boston University faculty. And we built a system to diagnose brain disorders in 1986 It's a long time ago, but that introduced me into Bayesian reasoning and so on. And then when I initiated my career, I was trained really globally. So I studied in Venezuela as a high school student, as an undergraduate. I spent eight months in Italy learning Italian. And then I went to England and Cambridge and I learned English.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:00)
The real English.

**Mark Maybury** (3:00)
The real English.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:01)
C3PO would be proud.

**Mark Maybury** (3:03)
C3PO, exactly, that's right. Exactly. Indeed, my master's was in speech and language processing. So you can't make this up. I worked with Karen Spark-Jones, a professor there, who was one of the great godmothers of computational linguistics.
But then I transitioned back to becoming an Air Force officer and right away I got interested in security, national security, computer security, AI security. I didn't know it at the time, but we were developing knowledge-based software development and we think about how do we make sure the software is secure.
Fast forward to 20 years later, I was asked to lead a federal laboratory, the National Cybersecurity Federally Funded Laboratory at MITRE, supporting NIST, and I had come up the ranks as an AI person applying AI to a whole bunch of domains, including computer security, building insider threat detection modules, building penetration testing, automated agents, doing a lot of machine learning of malware, working with some really great scientists at MITRE and the federal government and beyond, agencies and in commercial companies. And so that really transformed my mind in terms of, you know, how do we, for example, and never forget working together with some scientists on the first ability to secure medicine pumps that are the most frequently used device in a hospital. And so that's the kind of foundation of security thinking and risk management that comes through. I got to work with the great Donna Dodson at NIST and other great leaders. And so those really were foundational theoretical and practical underpinnings that shaped my thinking and security.