About — Stephanie Culver

The Story

Most consultants tell you what to do. I've spent 15 years doing it.

As Director of Engineering at Best Buy, I led the platform transformation that reduced annual run rate by $30M, avoided $35M in capital expense, and delivered a 10x return on a $9M governance investment — while building and running a 70-person global engineering organization across the US and India.

I designed and ran the AI tooling evaluation that standardized Best Buy on Microsoft Copilot and introduced agentic engineering practices across the org. I took application provisioning from 41 days to 2 hours by rebuilding the standards, not just the tools. I navigated the Broadcom/VMware acquisition without losing delivery momentum — reducing financial exposure by 80% while keeping a $30M cloud transformation on track.

Before Best Buy, at Target, I built the reliability platform that cut incident impact by 56% and delivered the company's first clean Thanksgiving weekend in 30 years — work that earned Board of Directors recognition.

That experience — running real budgets, leading real teams, delivering results that appeared on board slides — is what I bring to clients now.

How I Work

Most clients come to me with one of three problems.

I work with mid-market companies and PE-backed teams as a fractional AI and engineering advisor.

AI transformation that actually sticks.

Most AI initiatives stall before they scale — not because the technology doesn't work, but because the organization doesn't change around it. At Liberty Mutual, I built the company's first cloud platform — the foundational work that became the transformation documented in The Value Flywheel Effect (Anderson & McCann, 2022) and the AWS case study. I ran a version of that same work at Best Buy: a 3-month structured AI evaluation, enterprise standardization on Microsoft Copilot, and the rollout of agentic engineering practices across a 70-person global org. Getting the governance right. Getting people to actually change how they work. That's where most enterprise AI initiatives stall — and it's the work I know how to do.

AI they want to implement but don't know how to govern.

Every leadership team is being asked about AI. Most are watching their engineers experiment ad hoc without standards, security frameworks, or a way to measure whether it's working. I've built this playbook at scale. I can help you deploy it.

Cloud costs that have gotten out of control.

Migration projects that seemed like they'd pay off but haven't. Spend that grows with headcount instead of with revenue. I've built the governance models and cost showback frameworks that make cloud spend accountable — and I know how to translate that into $30M in annual savings.

Engineering organizations that aren't moving fast enough.

Velocity problems that feel like people problems but are usually process and platform problems. I find the actual constraint — and fix it.

Beyond the Work

What the resume doesn't capture.

I'm a 3x U.S. National Synchronized Skating Champion and former ISU World Championships competitor. Fifteen years of elite competition taught me things business school doesn't: how to perform under pressure, how to execute technical complexity in real time, and how to come back from setbacks without losing your standards.

I volunteer as a Head Judge for Technovation[MN], mentoring high school girls building technology and AI solutions to real-world problems.

I hold a Master of Liberal Arts in Information Technology and a Graduate Certificate in Strategic Management from Harvard University, and a BS in Business Administration magna cum laude from Northeastern University.

I'm based in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, and work remotely with clients across the US.

I build the AI and cloud infrastructure that makes companies operate at a different level.