Head of Data Protection for Whole Foods Market.
After acquisition, hundreds of stores each held their own customer and personal data, siloed store by store. The mandate was not to force everything into one place, it was visibility: who accesses the data, how, through which services, and for how long, especially for personal information, and where the detection gaps were.
This was one of my first major AI projects. I used in-house AI tooling to synthesize and classify data lineage at scale, mapping where data came from and how it was used, and a behavioral-analytics tool to baseline normal access and alert on anomalies. The result was strong encryption on the most sensitive data, full audit readiness, and a sharp drop in data-exfiltration risk.