Transforming a Technology Organization for the Future: Starbucks’s Gerri Martin-Flickinger

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
What's in a name? Today we talk with Gerri Martin-Flickinger, former Chief Technology Officer at Starbucks, about how the names we use can make a big difference in innovation and motivation.
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 Gerri Martin-Flickinger, former executive vice president and chief technology officer at Starbucks.
Gerri, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Welcome.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:12)
Really great to have you here, Gerri.

**Gerri Martin-Flickinger** (1:13)
Thanks for having me.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:15)
So Gerri, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your journey to this point, and what it's been like.

**Gerri Martin-Flickinger** (1:22)
This topic today is gonna be about AI. So I would really love to go way back in time to the 1980s. And I know you probably didn't expect me to start there when you asked me that question, but I have to start there because I went to Washington State University, go Cougs, and I had an emphasis in artificial intelligence way back in the day. And in fact, did my senior project with a neural net that was built in Lisp, which is nobody even remembers what that is anymore. But the reason why I start there is because I have had a love for AI and the potential of AI techniques for all of this time.
And it's been really exciting in the last five or six years to see that we're finally at a place where technology, both compute and storage and data, have gotten to the point where we can actually start to achieve some of those visions we had way back then. But let me start in 85 After going to school and getting a degree in computer science, I went to Chevron, the oil energy company, spent my early years there and did some really cool AI work while I was there, which was really more in a research mode and did some technology that actually was sold and purchased by some other companies outside of Chevron. After that, I became the first CIO for McAfee in the late 90s when McAfee was still quite small but grew quite large. And that was really fun because if you think about antivirus in those early days, it was one of the first SaaS companies because you would buy your antivirus software, but then you would get these payloads every month that would be the new virus signatures to keep protecting your machine. So in effect, it was like a subscription business. Being part of that in the early days of, frankly, the internet and right during the whole.com period was super insightful and really taught me a lot about scale and consumer digital before we called it consumer digital.
I then took a little bit of time out of my career to have two beautiful twin daughters.
And then I came back as the CIO for VeriSign, another security company, and then became the CIO for Adobe and was at Adobe for about 10 years and part of the team who migrated their product offerings into the cloud, into a true subscription SaaS business. And then joined Starbucks a little over six years ago as their first chief technology officer and really helped them migrate and move into a more modern architecture stack, evolve their entire digital platform, including mobile order and pay, innovate IoT into all of the stores. So really just a whole lot of really fun at scale technology and in the process got back to our roots and did some AI at the same time.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (4:12)
This is a phenomenal series of things you've been part of. And I'm curious as someone whose interest and exposure and practicing of AI goes back to the 80s, as you said, and you've seen the various eras of technological and organizational innovations and the playing field has continuously increased.
What do you think is some of the biggest misconceptions that still exist in the minds of executives, particularly when it comes to this topic?

**Gerri Martin-Flickinger** (4:48)