Twenty-five years of enterprise transformation. Now applied to AI.
Enterprise AI Practice Leader, Execution Specialists Group (ESG)

Rich Steele has spent a career at the fault line, driving transformations that bridge the gap between what a company decides to do and executing the work. That gap showed up in different forms across financial services and healthcare: post-merger integration, platform development, and the organizational strain that transformational change creates.

AI-driven transformation is reproducing that same gap, faster than most enterprises expected. The organizations finding traction aren't the ones with the most aggressive deployment timelines. They're the ones that treated adoption as an organizational problem before a technology problem, building the governance, execution discipline, and organizational change management maturity that determine whether a capability actually changes how work gets done.

That perspective shapes both his advisory work at ESG and what he teaches in the graduate classroom at the University of Denver.

About Rich

Rich Steele has spent more than 25 years learning why enterprise transformations fail and building the execution discipline to prevent it. As Enterprise AI Practice Leader at Execution Specialists Group (ESG), he works alongside advisory teams and client leadership to treat AI as enterprise-wide transformation rather than a technology project. His perspective comes from senior PMO leadership at Charles Schwab, DaVita, and JPMorgan Chase, and earlier roles in solution architecture, application development, and enterprise delivery. Rich is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Denver and holds master's degrees in Education and Political Science from The Ohio State University.