Karl Hightower is Senior Vice President of Enterprise Information Management and Chief Data Officer for Novant Health, where he and his teams oversee the advancing of the use of information assets for the company. His teams deliver products and services ranging from advanced analytics and real-time messaging to delivering Cognitive Computing and AI solutions throughout the enterprise. He and his teams focus on simplifying how information is consumed within the decision making processes through innovative and collaborative means. Karl has held executive roles in large retail and energy trading companies, and has held pivotal roles in telecommunications, manufacturing, supply chain, insurance, government, banking and finance, and food and beverage. In these roles, Karl set strategic direction and created alignment to direct structures during the pivot years of these industries, devised and led game-changing initiatives, increased revenue by millions – and in one case billions – of dollars, became an early champion and expert in cloud adoption, personalization through social media data, real-time pricing structures, and extreme automation through machine learning and AI-based algorithms. Karl has an undergraduate degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in PoliticalScience, and was in the first class to go through Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious ISRI Enterprise Architecture and Strategy program. Karl is the son of two college professors, and is from a long line of educators. This upbringing instilled a continuous thirst for learning and creating opportunities for others to learn. While in Dallas, Karl helped to found and build the STEAM education program for the district. The program included one entirely Spanish immersive middle school as well as associate degree paths in the high schools. Karl was heavily involved in the Texas Amateur Golf Association as well as the Dallas LPGA events. In Charlotte, Karl has joined the District Advisory Board for Career and Technical Education (CTE) for the Charlotte Mecklenburg School district.