JPMorganChase Innovation, Technology & Agility

What’s your professional or academic background? How did you break into the tech industry?
I earned a finance degree from the University of Virginia and began my career in banking before pivoting to serve as a special agent in the FBI. That chapter sparked my interest in technology, offering unexpected opportunities to leverage innovations for enhancing investigations and saving lives. When I explored roles outside the FBI, a technology leader at JPMorganChase recognized my drive and gave me an opportunity, believing in my ability to upskill and learn in the absence of traditional credentials.

The highlight of my 14-year service with the FBI was serving as an operator on the Hostage Rescue Team, where I took on collateral duties that introduced me to product and project management – building the night vision goggle program and modernizing navigation and rebreather systems for closed-circuit diving. Realizing my ambition to work in cybersecurity, I looked to the FBI’s Cyber Division where I built partnerships, led cyber threat intel sharing and managed incident response against sophisticated threat actors. As a senior leader in the Operational Technology Division, I guided teams delivering mission-critical capabilities and innovation, including hardware and integration for the FBI’s body-worn camera program.

How did you learn how to use AI, and how do you apply it to your work?
As I transitioned from the FBI to JPMorganChase, a mentor encouraged me to immerse myself in emerging tech – especially AI. Beyond what I learned in my own research, I’ve benefited from the firm’s AI-forward culture and internal resources which include foundational overviews, lectures and demos to help employees learn how to use AI responsibly. I became an early adopter of JPMorganChase’s award-winning LLM Suite, a proprietary generative AI platform which I use regularly to refine executive communications and ensure tone, depth and structure align with audience needs. I now lead a global team of cybersecurity architects supporting a portfolio of internal products, external apps and cloud infrastructure, much of which leverage or host AI/ML functionalities. Conventional security patterns don’t always apply, so we use AI to structure review frameworks, generate threat models and build and query a corpus of published work for quick reference. These tools are helping us scale security, develop new architecture patterns and uplift the firm’s tech ecosystem.

What do you consider the greatest benefit of leveraging AI? How has it positively impacted the work you produce as a whole or your career?
In product security, we’re seeing material benefits from AI. First, it’s dramatically improving the precision and speed of our written communications – refining executive updates, decks and talking points and saving hours of manual effort. Second, AI is helping our team rapidly upskill and close knowledge gaps, enabling real-time understanding and faster, more accurate responses to complex engagements and security questions. Third, we’re using the firm’s AI Threat Modeling Co-Pilot (AITMC) to help us better standardize and scale security reviews across numerous AI/ML-enabled apps. AI is reducing toil, automating legacy processes and freeing our architects to proactively engage with product teams, business stakeholders and vendors to focus on securely enabling emerging tech and legacy infrastructure. From a career perspective, I think it is opening the door for rapid learning and prototyping and going to provide incredible opportunities for those who take the time to learn and leverage it.