Sigma Foods

Carlos Marval

Digital Growth Catalyst

Carlos Marval, Director of IT Services & Operations and Head of AI at Sigma Foods, brings a business-first approach to technology, aligning data-driven AI integration, operational standardization and cybersecurity with cost efficiency, productivity and growth. His perspective shows how disciplined technology leadership can strengthen resilience, improve enterprise agility and turn digital investment into measurable competitive advantage.

A Business-First Foundation

My path into technology began in business school. When I enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, the program and its Management Information Systems discipline were nationally recognized, and the IT program stood out as one of the school’s strongest offerings. That combination was exactly what I was looking for.

I wanted to understand how to run technology as a business and use it to create value, not just how to build it.

That foundation led to three decades at IBM, where I began as a programmer and advanced to an executive role in the outsourcing business. Working closely with customers across industries gave me firsthand exposure to a wide range of business challenges and showed me how technology and process improvement can create meaningful value. By the time I left, the accounts I managed ranked among IBM’s five largest global customers, and I had spent time in Asia delivering services to clients across multiple continents. Operating at that scale sharpened my perspective. It taught me that technology and business are inseparable, a lesson I carried into Sigma Foods and continue to apply in how I lead today.

Driving Growth Through Standardization

Sigma Foods has completed more than 50 acquisitions and integrations over the past 20 years. That level of growth creates real operational complexity, and we are now in the middle of a multi-year standardization program across the combined organization. I lead several of its near-term deliverables.

Managing that pace requires balancing modernization with minimal business disruption. It also depends on structured communication, standardized processes, and a deliberately lean organizational model, especially as the speed of solutioning today far exceeds what I encountered earlier in my career.

I view our business through three core verticals: manufacturing, distribution, and warehousing. Within that framework, every initiative I approve must clearly improve cost efficiency or productivity, generate revenue through market analytics, or support market share growth.

Platform modernization, endpoint management, and data literacy all follow that same logic. The goal is to keep data secure, available, and protected across environments while enabling business functions across platforms where needed. Nearly every decision I make is data-driven, and applying that data to its fullest potential is where our most active work is happening today.

Scaling AI with Purpose

That data-driven mindset is most visible in how I approach my role as the company’s Head of AI in the U.S. IT is part of the business, not separate from it, and my team is structured accordingly. We work directly with business units, building fluency in both the technology and the business context behind it.

Our AI rollout began with a bottom-up approach. We started by securing the data, establishing guardrails, and defining access rights. From there, we delivered more than 3,600 hours of training across the company to build enterprise-wide AI fluency, especially around the Microsoft technology stack. That choice was natural because it reflects how we already operate. Sigma Foods runs heavily in the Microsoft environment, and Copilot Studio embeds governance directly into the generative AI experience for the broader organization.

The permissions model shows how intentional that governance is. For example, if a user builds a virtual agent connected to a SharePoint folder and shares it with others, the agent will only surface data to colleagues who already have the same access rights. The system enforces those permissions automatically.

  Every initiative I approve must clearly improve cost efficiency and productivity, or generate revenue through market analytics, or support market share growth.   

We reinforced AI adoption through webinars, regular communications, and newsletters. Today, approximately 139 use cases have been identified, with 13 active business-impacting AI projects delivered in the U.S. and additional initiatives running across the company.

Alongside that bottom-up effort, we also run a top-down strategy. As part of our technology stack, we chose Snowflake to aggregate internal and other sources of data and turn it into usable insights for business leaders. For example, Sales and Marketing leadership can now build more targeted business and sales plans from that platform. Both approaches were designed to work together, and both depend on the same foundation: data that is protected, accessible, and usable at all times.

Strengthening Operational Resilience

As a manufacturer, I oversee both IT and OT environments, with OT historically carrying greater exposure. Third-party vendors often request direct network access to industrial systems, and we are actively closing that gap. The cybersecurity strategy we built is consolidated and layered, designed to protect the business without disrupting operations.

CrowdStrike provides real-time endpoint detection and response (EDR), while Tanium enables rapid visibility, investigation, and remediation across managed assets. Together with Tenable, these platforms provide continuous insight into asset inventory, security posture, configurations, and vulnerabilities. Tenable's risk-based prioritization helps us understand our exposure, focus on the most critical vulnerabilities, and accelerate remediation efforts.

At the core of our manufacturing operations, Claroty secures and monitors the Operational Technology (OT) environment, helping identify cyber risks across industrial assets. CyberArk protects privileged accounts and credentials, reducing the risk of unauthorized access, credential theft, and lateral movement. Cato Networks delivers a cloud-native SASE platform that enforces consistent security policies and provides secure connectivity for sites, remote users, and third parties worldwide, ensuring employees remain protected regardless of location.

These platforms lead their respective categories, and the investment is fully justified. More importantly, this layered posture allows security, resilience, and operational efficiency to advance together rather than compete for priority.

Learning at the Speed of Innovation

My advice to the next generation of IT leaders is simple: school provides the foundation, but independent learning builds everything that follows. My son is studying IT in college today, and I tell him the same thing I tell anyone entering this field: formal education matters, but it cannot keep pace with how quickly technology is changing. Even reference material from April 2025 can already feel dated.

Curriculum takes time to evolve, but the industry does not wait. Read widely, attend conferences where the conversations are practical and current, and build a network of people working through similar challenges. I was not much of a conference person until AI accelerated two or three years ago. That changed my perspective.

I recently attended Snowflake’s conference in San Francisco, which drew roughly 22,000 attendees and included Anthropic among the major companies represented. What stood out most was the atmosphere. It felt less like a traditional industry event and more like a think tank, with people from every sector exploring what comes next together.

I believe we are still at the very beginning. Fifteen years ago at IBM, I was part of early discussions about applying AI to cancer treatment research. At the time, it felt experimental. Today, that capability is increasingly available in clinical settings.

I see similar transformation coming across medicine, utilities, and nearly every industry. What energizes me most is working with teams that believe everything is possible and are willing to move quickly to prove it.

That is the art of the possible, and we have barely begun.