France Roy
Chief Technology Officer in San Francisco Bay Area
I'm a CTO who transforms technology organizations into AI-native operations — not by adding AI tools at the edges, but by redesigning how engineering, product, and delivery actually work.
At Balsam Brands, a global direct-to-consumer retailer, I lead Technology, Data, Product, and Program Management. Over the past two years I've led one of the more complete enterprise AI transformations in mid-market e-commerce:
→ Rebuilt the software development lifecycle around AI agents — spec-driven development, AI-assisted code generation adopted across every engineering pod, and automated program reporting replacing manual status work.
→ Redesigned the operating model itself: restructured delivery into business-capability pods, stood up a dedicated AI Platforms function, and built an AI Center of Excellence that extends AI capability beyond engineering to citizen developers across the business.
→ Modernized the platform stack in parallel — ERP replacement, composable commerce, order management, integration, and a Snowflake data platform — because AI transformation fails on legacy foundations.
The through-line of my career is using technology inflection points to change what a business is capable of. At Anheuser-Busch InBev, I served as CTO of the Direct-to-Consumer organization — 450+ people, 40+ engineering teams across 18 countries, technology for 14,000 retail stores and 30+ e-commerce ventures, and $1.5B in incremental net revenue. Before that, at American Express, I led a 300+ person engineering organization through the agile transformation that reshaped how the company built software — the same discipline of rewiring how teams work, not just what tools they use, that underpins my AI transformation work today.
What I bring to a CEO or board: I operate as a business partner first — org design, operating model, cost discipline, and vendor accountability alongside architecture. I've done M&A integration at global scale, agile transformation before it was table stakes, and now AI transformation while most companies are still writing the strategy deck.
I share what I'm learning as I go — the operating model, the metrics, the honest failures. If you're wrestling with how AI changes the way your teams work, that's a conversation I'm always excited to have.