Albertsons

Carina Reyes, an accomplished executive leader, brings a proven track record of guiding organizations and clients through comprehensive transformations encompassing digital, cloud, cultural, and technological realms. Holding a history of influential Global P&L/GM leadership positions, she drives the evolution of consulting, design, and the delivery of technology practices along with global IT services. Passionate and dedicated to facilitating business growth and fostering transformative initiatives, Reyes has emerged as a trusted advisor and technology executive leader across diverse industries, including high-tech, healthcare, CPG, real estate, hospitality, construction, insurance, and not-for-profit sectors. Currently, she holds the role of Vice President of Cloud COE & Platform Engineering at Albertsons and presently working on enabling AI and becoming one of the early adopters of AI.

Please share with our readers your career journey and current roles and responsibilities.

I am a technology veteran with experience both within IT organizations and professional services spanning 25 years. I currently work at Albertsons, a prominent 74 billion-dollar retail company, with a primary focus on delivery the joy of food to our consumers. Albertsons, Inc has over 20 brands, including Safeway and Tom Randall, spread across the nation. I joined Albertsons 21 months ago as their Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) leader and cloud platform engineer. My organization serves the engineering application teams successful delivery of their products in our cloud environment. The Cloud COE encompasses product transformation, cloud governance, financial operations (FinOps) cost optimization, asset management, and oversight of the product management office. In addition to my COE responsibilities, I lead the Cloud Platform Engineering group. This involves overseeing cloud foundation, containers/computing, database, integration services externally (b2B) and internally.  I lead the cloud transformation journey, moving all our workloads from two data centers to the cloud.

I held various executive roles at EY, JLL and Xerox.  At these three companies, I sponsored and/or led the transformation of a professional services team while delivering major transformations for the customers.  Prior to these companies, I spent 13-years at Cisco, where I had both customer facing and internal roles driving new innovation in networking, collaboration and storage.  Prior to Cisco, I worked at various startups.

  ​a strong leader is one who wholeheartedly believes that their success hinges more on the collective strength of their people, leaders, and teams.

Can you share some of the challenges you notice in the marketplace?

The current business landscape demands unprecedented speed and agility. Having worked both inside IT and as a consultant, I've witnessed the vital role of companies that can scale rapidly in response to market dynamics. Notably, those leveraging cloud technologies demonstrated resiliency and seized opportunities for expansion and contraction, emerging as winners in the volatile Covid period. 

As with any transformation or large-scale changes, there are tradeoffs.  Companies that shifted to the cloud, cost management was quite different. Unlike the predictability of DC operations, controlling costs in the cloud came with greater surprises.  Companies need to equally focus on transformation and governance and invest in policies, controls, and automations to prevent costs from spiraling out of control due to the speed of convenience.   Artificial intelligence can play significant role in this area of FinOps and Cloud governance.

The advent of AI adds another layer of complexity. While promising significant advantages, uncontrolled and unmanaged AI poses new sets of challenges. Establishing proper governance and controls will make or break these efforts.  AI’s rapid trajectory in the next five years will transform products to be far easier to use and humanize the digital experience at unprecedented speed. As we embrace the era of Gen AI, the scale and speed of transformation will reach unprecedented levels and governance will play an even more vital role.  Leaders need to be ready to jump on the rocketship.

What are some of the strategies you employ to adapt to these changes?

Getting the people excited about what is ahead I find yields the greatest productivity.  By reaching out to our customers regularly, our leaders can anticipate and prepare an approach that is platform centric, a self-service shared services model..  Doing so gives us the ability to give them the speed and agility they demand. 

Collaborating consultatively, we push for short iterations to facilitate prioritization and acceleration.  As we anticipate shifts, whether in technology, processes, or the advent of Gen AI, my approach is to dive-in by learning first and role model across the teams.  Learning should align seamlessly with experiences.   For instance, introducing new technology, like Gen AI, involves piloting small use cases with a limited group.

In the evolving landscape of technology delivery, the people-centric approach becomes increasingly essential.  My approach to agility extends beyond technology and product development.  It encompasses people and leadership.   Managing the human aspect involves providing skill uplifts that works well with their schedules and fostering excitement through on-the-job experiences and timely celebrations.

How do you envision the future of this industry?

Looking into the future, the speed of change is set to intensify.  Multi-cloud, digitization of health, food, agriculture, mobility (cars, trucks, farm machines etc) are quickly expanding to include AI capabilities.

For example, the high critical thinking and analysis skills, often attributed to our industry ‘rock stars,’ are on the path of democratization through Gen AI. This would create better correlations and derive intelligence from historical data.  AI, being a transformative power, comes with a dual nature of opportunities and threats.  AI expedites processes and decision-making, but it is still years away from what we imagine in the movies.  I will bet that technical support will transform as AIOps become a commodity in less than a few years due to the amount of data and machine learning already available in the last decade. Mastering the delicate balance in the application of AI is paramount and relies heavily on good data and machine learning.  Good data applied well can bring incredible advances while the contrary can be alarming such as misapplication of health information to a customer receiving incorrect prognosis and outdated information providing the wrong technology solution.  Realistically, these challenges are no different to current challenges today; but AI will be watched and judged more closely. 

Similarly, new marketplace concepts integrating our wearable health data, lab reports with our grocery shopping can help the consumer focus on wellness.  One example may be a person with pre-diabetic numbers would be advised at the grocery store on a purchase that may not be best for his/her health or perhaps be given a healthier grocery list or recipe.  Today, our health data are largely disparate at labs, doctor offices, hospitals.  Imagine a time when all are correlated, analyzed and guidance provided on our overall wellness with a more personalized and customized, grounded in better science.

What is your piece of advice to your fellow peers?

Cloud transformation, and the influence of Gen AI continue to reshape how we work and live today. Our ability to react and proact with agility requires different set of leadership skills. 

1. Need for speed.  It necessitates a new mindset that embraces speed as a way of life, new way of working (recruiting, learning, developing etc) and problem solving.

2. Participate early on the AI transformative journey starting with ongoing learning and preparation.

3. Empower the next level of leaders to make decisions, take risks and iterative application of AI with the scientific method by allowing failures to test what would succeed.

4. Focus on the collective team:  A strong leader is one who wholeheartedly believes that their success hinges more on the collective strength of their people and cross-teams rather than individual prowess. The era of isolated decision-making has been replaced by a necessity for close collaboration.  The advent of the cloud has played a significant role in this shift. Cloud teams and application teams must forge close collaborations with their peers. The landscape has changed to the extent that what used to be considered admirable qualities are now essential basics for success. The focus should steadfastly remain on people—your own team and peers—and how effectively you connect and collaborate with them.

5. Celebrate often:  The speed we are expected to move can cause exhaustion leading to health challenges or burnouts.  Take the time to celebrate results, allow for needed breaks to reenergize and reward team successes.