Kerrie is a visionary, a practical thinker, and an extraordinary problem solver. His career began with punch cards, and he has brought leadership to every era of computing: mainframe, client-server, Internet, Mobile, Cloud, and AI using LLMs and Generative AI. In recognizing his sustained contributions to the engineering profession, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2023. He is a member of several boards, author, public speaker, and consultant. His next book, titled LLMs and Generative AI in Healthcare, is due to be published in 2024.
Kerrie is a former Google executive, VP and CTO at Cisco and IBM Fellow Emeritus.
For one of the largest healthcare companies in the United States, he built a high-performance engineering team comprised of software engineers, PhDs, scientists, AI engineers, data scientists, and DevOps engineers incubating and applying leading-edge technologies in healthcare. He launched a patent program and culture, started an Academy of Technology to work wicked problems spanning business silos, and created a robust career path for Fellows and Distinguished Engineers to grow and retain the best technical talent.
Kerrie’s Background
Kerrie started programming at the age of 15, which is remarkable only when you realize the year was 1969. As a 6-year-old, he showed up at a newly Sue Duncan Children’s Center and kept showing up until he was accepted into the program. He realized that education was the way out of the poverty around him.
He became a tutor at the children’s center, for a few decades, tutoring kids and later the former United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the late actor Michael Clarke Duncan. He received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and a Juris Doctor Degree from DePaul University, the same university where, years later, he joined the board of trustees, was a 2016 commencement speaker, and was conferred an honorary PhD.
Kerrie lives in the Bay Area and you will often find him practicing Bikram Yoga.