With over 25 years of experience as a strategic business leader and Army Combat Veteran, Brett has honed his ability to work across disciplines and with diverse clients to drive channel and commercialization growth. His career spans large corporations, startups, and mid-sized companies, consistently focusing on technology and its transformative potential. 

Now, Brett is preparing BrightAI for its next phase of growth. He believes that BrightAI excels at demonstrating to traditional companies how technology can revolutionize their industries, address global infrastructure challenges, and deliver new value.

Why did you decide to join BrightAI?

BrightAI is truly solving real world problems. Everyone needs drinking water. Infrastructure is aging. You need safer environments. The labor force is aging. How are we inspiring younger generations to come into any industry that doesn’t necessarily have technology? They will be excited to enter into that space because of technology. That’s a pretty cool intersection.

I’ve always been a technologist, even before the buzzwords of AI and the Internet of Things (IoT).  My love and passions in my career have been around commercialization, partnerships, and driving scale and growth with revenue and BrightAI was at that phase of maturity and ready for the next chapter. 

BrightAI has evolved to address aging infrastructure globally, showcasing how technology can offer operational efficiencies. In many of the verticals we operate in today, such as HVAC systems and pest environments, we focus on understanding the real-time state of machines. Traditionally, these tasks required a human to drive to each site for monitoring. Now, with edge computing, we can monitor, understand, and obtain real-time data and analytics remotely. The ability to detect, predict, and understand problems remotely is transformational for any company.

What are your roles and responsibilities?

My role is building out commercialization with the customer. That can mean scaling a product post-pilot and development, to global expansion. We have a great customer that is now looking to extend the next generation of technology and  AI to the 26 countries they operate in today. That’s a massive plan of ongoing commercialization. You have to think about how you execute and deploy the technology at scale and make it repeatable. 

It’s pretty exciting. We’re going to start to see that flywheel effect of commercialization and helping our customers. This is new for them, and so we must be patient, but at the same time push them and drive them. We want massive adoption of those products.

I work closely with Nancy Li, our EVP of Strategy & Growth. She’s building our funnel of new customers. I think about what it is we’re trying to build, and what is the ideal transition period when we do a proof of concept.  We will execute a pilot with a customer where later in the process I become involved to get to know the customer because we know it’s going to move to a commercialization opportunity and we make sure there is a beautiful transition between that phase of development and proof points to take it to market and deploy it.

What do you enjoy most about the work you are doing? 

BrightAI has so many talented people! It’s fun to learn about our customers’ products, how they built them, and about the next iteration. When you bring the right collaboration of people with business and technical acumen to data and science, you’re going to be smarter, and you’re all going to learn along the way.

I’ve always had a fierce appetite to learn. I’m not an engineer by trade, but I enjoy working with engineers because of how much I learn. I also love bringing the insights of the customer into the business so that it doesn’t get lost in the new product development cycle. 

I love interfacing with the customers and building long term partnerships. I want to plan and know where we’re going to be in 3 to 5 years together. I view these partnerships as long-term with tremendous growth and enterprise value creation for our customers as well as BrightAI.

How do you make sure that all the verticals get the attention they need from you when you move between them with your skills?

I’ve just always had a natural ability to compartmentalize. We’re all grinding, and especially in my daily world, I’m pivoting to probably 10 to 12 different things per day and need fierce prioritization. You must have ‘think time’, and you have to be highly organized. That probably comes from being in the military for a long time. I’m very structured that way.

I block time for each vertical and understand where they are, and what’s needed, constantly thinking about what’s next and where we’re at. We have a lot of great tools that enable efficiency and productivity. You must carve out time and block out your calendar. 

What milestones speak to the success of BrightAI’s collaboration with traditional industries?

With pest control, we’ve moved into trials (tests) with very large customers like Nestlé, Rentokil, and Ecolab, brands that people know. It’s testing environments such as food processing plants, medical equipment, or medical test labs where safety is critical. 

In food processing that means trying to produce quality food without any opportunity for pest intrusion such as insects or flies that increase likelihood of bacteria or any type of virus that could impact the health of the manufacturing process. High-level traffic can shut down an operation.  We’re seeing some great early results with trials on our Gen I flylight product. 

We had a pest control operator who installed one of the digital flylights in a test lab for a customer. They couldn’t believe the number of recorded flies because previous reports were so low. There are so many possibilities for error with manual touch. We’ve applied technology to a product that looks very similar to what they’ve been buying for years but AI and data processing are identifying the count digitally. Then you have a proof point to say, here’s what a traditional flylight does, now look at the digital application. That’s a very powerful case study. Now we have that huge manufacturer saying this type of flylight will be the spec on all their buildings. It’s going to be super exciting.

The results we are getting give us the ability to speak to people at a much higher level with proof points where we can say, “Let us show you the difference.” That’s an absolute no-brainer for any type of customer.

What does BrightAI do in terms of commercialization that is unique, that you’re bringing to customers?

We’re anchored with the right partners that we can scale with and continue to drive new growth over time. To commercialize correctly you have to have those anchor partners, market leaders. Then, you build the tools to commercialize that product and take it to other companies. It’s a lot of work, a lot of development, building a playbook along the way. How does that go to customer two, customer three, customer four, customer five. And more rapidly, it’s not going to be as high touch. But you have to successfully commercialize one first. 

As you think about BrightAI in the future, what does that look like? 

It’s a larger go-to-market engine, which includes people who are passionate about customers and the success of a product. They’re passionate about taking that customer to the next level. It’s a very exciting journey because that’s where BrightAI starts to think “How do we scale even beyond that?” And building tools that customers can build against that, whether it’s APIs or SDKs, etc. Those are exciting because that’s what makes a company just a huge multiplier of success when you can commercialize using the right tools and with a team that’s passionate about success and putting our customer first.

 What are your hobbies outside of work? 

I love being off the grid with no phone. I think we have to be more conscious of that in the world that we live in, especially with human connectivity, and what we’ve all been through globally with the pandemic. Technology is incredible but we, as humans, have to strike a balance of interaction and human touch versus just a pure digital environment. 

I’m very active. I’m not one to sit around much. I’m very passionate about coaching. I’ve coached my son’s baseball team and all stars and football since he started playing. I love developing young players not just as athletes, but also as human beings. I think it teaches incredible things about teamwork, respect, and diversity. I love the outdoors and mountain biking, running, skiing and hiking with my family.