Bio

Karl Hightower is a visionary leader with 20+ years of technical expertise and leadership across diverse sectors, including healthcare, retail, energy, and telecom. He excels in aligning interdepartmental goals to ensure company-wide success by empowering every member of the enterprise to make well-informed decisions and embrace change, resulting in increased revenue and cost savings. Karl is a highly sought-after subject matter expert who regularly authors articles and presents at industry conferences.

As an influential leader and effective communicator, Karl proactively collaborates with C-level executives and business unit leaders to resolve business obstacles and seize market opportunities, achieving organizational excellence. He ensures clarity of vision, strategy, and goals, facilitating informed decision- making and alignment through transparent communication.

Karl is dedicated to disrupting the digital landscape through innovation and emerging technologies. He leverages data-driven insights, cutting-edge analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to drive business transformation.

With a strong focus on corporate governance and compliance, Karl upholds adherence to regulatory requirements and data integrity standards. He drives initiatives to establish robust governance frameworks, fostering a culture of compliance consistency and accountability across the organization.

In his current role as Executive in Residence for Catalyst at Wellstar, Karl provides guidance and mentorship to teams on monetizing data, leveraging assets, and developing AI-driven products for sustainable growth. He identifies process gaps and remediation steps to facilitate proper functional execution of a sustainable data product marketplace and leads efforts to take data and AI products to market for Catalyst innovation.

Previously, as Chief Data Analytics Officer at Novant Health, Karl built a world-class data analytics and AI practice from scratch. He led a team in setting the strategic direction for the enterprise and changed how business units made decisions and drove priorities. Under his leadership, Novant Health achieved significant improvements in safety and quality, reduced costs, and fostered a culture of innovation and collaboration.

Karl holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is a Certified Enterprise Architect from Carnegie Mellon ISIR.