HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE
Chad brings a unique perspective to this role, shaped by a 25-year career in enterprise IT, with 12 of those years in the machine learning space. His journey began during the big data era, when combining disparate data sources required significant technical expertise. Those early experiences with customers implementing the kinds of fraud detection systems that are now ubiquitous in banking taught him some valuable lessons about how businesses take to new technologies.
“ I worked on some of the early projects with customers when that was a very new thing,” he recalls, describing credit card fraud alerts that consumers now take for granted. The transition from revolutionary to routine represents the arc that AI is currently traversing across multiple industries.
A tale of two eras The evolution from CPU-based big data processing to GPU-based AI, which Chad’ s career has straddled, represents more than just a simple hardware upgrade. It reflects a fundamental shift in how organisations process information and make decisions. Chad’ s background at Rackspace, where he helped build the company from 30 employees to more than 5,000 during its eight-year journey to going public, gave him an understanding of what it means to scale a company, a technology and a philosophy.
That experience now informs his approach at HPE, where the company serves customers across every conceivable industry vertical.
“Data’ s important, but when you use any kind of application on your computer or your phone, you’ ve got to have a network to communicate with it”
Chad Smykay, AI CTO, HPE
From life sciences and healthcare to manufacturing, hospitality, retail, financial services, insurance and energy, each sector has its own unique regulatory constraints and operational requirements.
The HPE GreenLake platform speaks to this comprehensive approach that the firm has to have. Rather than traditional infrastructure sales, HPE GreenLake operates as a cloud service model, one which allows customers to consume AI-capable resources on demand. This shift addresses the capital expenditure concerns that often stall AI initiatives while providing predictable operational costs.
The recent US $ 14bn acquisition of Juniper Networks underscores HPE’ s commitment to AI-enabled infrastructure. Juniper’ s AI-driven network operations capabilities, combined with HPE’ s existing Aruba networking portfolio, create an integrated offering that addresses the often-overlooked networking requirements of AI implementations.
108 October 2025