A Chief AI Officer reflects on integrating her professional expertise with her creative passions—from murals to quilling—and how these seemingly separate identities strengthen each other, proving that women don't have to choose between being serious professionals and authentic creators.
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Influential Woman · Enterprise Technology and AI
Lori Rainery
Scrum
Founder & CAIO Consultant, Polaris Crescent Enterprise LLC
Phoenix, AZ 85023
2006Years experience
1Article published
Her Story
About Lori
Lori Rainery is the Founder of Polaris Crescent Enterprise LLC, where she provides Chief AI Officer services to small and mid-sized businesses and growing enterprises that lack the resources to build a full AI governance program. She developed a subscription-based platform that pairs with her consulting work, guiding clients on ethical and safe AI use, the metrics that demonstrate return on investment, and AI roadmaps that span both the business and product sides. Her firm also offers the Polaris AI Assessment, an eight-dimension maturity framework that gives organizations a score and a personalized path forward.
With more than 20 years of experience in enterprise architecture, data, and digital transformation, Rainery has held leadership roles at Everbridge, OpenText, Zix, and First American Payment Systems. At Everbridge, she led enterprise technology services and enterprise AI, co-chaired AI governance, headed the AI task force, and helped move the organization toward ISO/IEC 42001-aligned readiness. A conversation at the Google Next conference convinced her that her methodology could serve other organizations, and she launched her own firm in 2026. She also serves as a technical advisory board member for one AI startup and as Chief Technology Officer for another.
Rainery holds credentials that include TOGAF, the AWS LLM certification, the MIT AI Governance and Professional Certification, and the Chicago Booth Chief AI Officer Executive Program. She belongs to AI Women’s Builders, Women in Data Science, and Phoenix FinTech Payment Space, and she volunteers at Mom’s Market in Phoenix. A committed mentor to women early in their technology careers, she is a strong advocate for pairing AI adoption with psychological safety for employees.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Lori
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to continuous learning, networking, and getting out and talking with people. Discipline and perseverance have also been central for me, and I have never liked being told no. My passion for technology carried me from handling basic password resets to writing code, and eventually to creating my own flagship product- Polaris Navidion.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I have received is to pay it forward and always be there for someone else.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
If you cannot get a seat at the table, make your own.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Many leadership teams have bought into the AI hype but don't invest enough in the human element. Too often, the cost of tokens is treated as a reason to reduce headcount. The hardest conversation I have when consulting is helping leaders see that they don't need to go there immediately — alternatives exist, including the credits, programs, and enterprise licenses that hyperscalers are actively offering to help organizations scale responsibly. I've built these governance programs myself, so I'm not anti-AI — I'm anti-shortcut. The biggest opportunity right now is for leaders to redeploy their people into higher-value work as the technology matures, instead of treating headcount as the first lever to pull. Companies that invest in their people alongside the technology are going to out-execute the ones that didn't. AI maturity isn't just a technology problem — it's a people problem, and the leaders who treat it that way will win.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
In my work, I value investing in people, building teams around a shared goal, mentoring others, and giving women a voice in a male-dominated field. Personally, I am an artist who paints acrylic murals, creates quilling and Cricut designs, and enjoys 3D printing. I also volunteer at local centers and treasure time with my family.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Lori
The Quilling Scissors Taught Me What the Boardroom Couldn't
The Power of Refusing to Compress Yourself
People meet me as a technologist. A consultant. Someone who talks about AI governance and enterprise architecture for a living. What they don't usually see is the version of me sitting at my kitchen table at 9 p.m., carefully curling a strip of paper into a spiral for a quilling piece or standing in front of a half-finished acrylic mural, trying to decide if the color is right.
I've always needed to make things with my hands. Not because I have extra time—I never have extra time—but because there's a kind of thinking that only happens when your hands are busy and your mind is quiet. Painting, quilling, Cricut projects, and 3D printing—none of it pays the bills. All of it keeps me whole.
I think a lot of women in male-dominated fields learn to compress themselves. You learn which parts of yourself are "appropriate" to bring into the room and which parts you tuck away. For years, I didn't talk about the murals or the paper art in professional settings. It felt separate—like admitting I spend my weekends with a glue gun might undercut the version of me who sits across the table from executives.
I don't believe that anymore.
The same instinct that makes me good at my work—seeing a messy, chaotic problem and finding the structure hiding inside it—is the same instinct that makes me good at a mural. You start with nothing. You make a thousand small decisions. You step back constantly to see if the whole thing is actually working, not just the piece you're staring at. That's not two different skills. That's one skill wearing two different outfits.
Being a mother taught me something similar. Raising kids is the original lesson in building something you can't fully control, investing years in a process before you see the outcome, and loving the work even on the days it doesn't look like progress. I bring that patience into my consulting work more than any certification ever gave me.
And I volunteer at Mom's Market in Phoenix, not because it builds my résumé, but because showing up for other women—in whatever form that takes, whether it's a conversation, a connection, or a free weekend morning—is just who I am. It always has been.
If there's one thing I'd tell a younger version of myself, or any woman reading this who feels like she has to pick a lane—the architect or the artist, the executive or the mom, the serious professional or the person who still loves gluing tiny strips of paper into spirals—it's this: You don't have to pick. The parts of you that seem the least "professional" are often the ones doing the most work to make you good at everything else.
I'm not just a Chief AI Officer. I'm a mom. I'm an artist. I'm someone who still gets genuinely excited about a new 3D printing project at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. All of it is me. None of it is extra.
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