Wei stands out among North America’s leading data and AI executives by pushing beyond incremental transformation towards a fundamentally different operating model. At IHG, she is re-architecting how AI is created, governed, and scaled through a unified agentic AI platform that brings visibility, control, and usability to what is often a fragmented landscape. Her career across global enterprises reflects a consistent ability to translate complex architecture into measurable business outcomes at scale. What differentiates her leadership is a dual focus on systems and culture: embedding governance and observability at the infrastructure level while simultaneously enabling non-technical teams to participate in AI creation. Her concept of an AI Creator Economy captures a broader shift many organizations are still grappling with. In a market moving past experimentation, Wei’s emphasis on trust, adoption, and enterprise-wide integration places her firmly at the forefront of data and AI leadership.
Wei Manfredi is Senior Vice President of AI and Architecture at IHG Hotels & Resorts, where she leads enterprise AI and data architecture to drive large-scale transformation and competitive advantage. With more than 25 years of experience, Wei has built a career turning data complexity into business value across financial services, retail, consumer goods, and global operations.
Wei’s career spans leadership roles at Visa, Lululemon, Google Cloud, and Fortune 100 enterprises, where she has operated at the intersection of architecture, strategy, and transformation. She has led multi-hundred-million-dollar portfolios, developed enterprise-wide AI platforms, and delivered measurable cost transformation at global scale.
Beyond technical execution, Wei is known for her belief that culture is the true foundation of successful data and AI initiatives. She pioneered the concept of the “AI Creator Economy,” focused on embedding AI fluency across organizations so that employees actively create value with AI rather than simply consume it.
Wei is an active voice in the data and AI community. She has delivered keynote presentations at industry events including Gartner CDAO, has been recognized among the 100 Most Influential AI Leaders in the United States, and is the author of an upcoming book on enterprise AI transformation. Through her writing, including her Substack series The AI Disruptor, Wei challenges organizations to rethink readiness, equity, and organizational design in the age of AI.
Wei’s leadership centers on reshaping how organizations operate, ensuring data and AI capabilities are deeply embedded into both systems and culture.
As a data and AI leader, which traits and skills do you think matter most, and which of those have been most influential for you in your current position?
“The most dangerous belief in this field is that technical depth alone makes a data and AI leader. It doesn’t. It makes a strong individual contributor. Leadership requires something harder to build and easier to underestimate.
“The traits that matter most, in my experience, are:
- Intellectual courage. The willingness to challenge what the organization believes about its own data (its quality, its readiness, its trustworthiness) even when that truth is inconvenient.
- Systems thinking over tool thinking. Seeing how data, people, process, and incentives interact as a whole, not optimizing one layer while breaking another.
- Communication as a leadership weapon. The ability to translate between engineering precision and boardroom stakes, fluently, in both directions, is rarer than any technical certification.
- Humanity first. AI transformation fails when leaders forget that the humans navigating it matter more than the models powering it.
“In my organization, the trait that has been most influential is the last one. Building a culture where people feel equipped and inspired to work alongside AI, rather than threatened by it, has unlocked more value than any single technology decision.
“Trust is the infrastructure that everything else runs on.”
Reflecting on your career, what is one non-traditional piece of advice (outside of technical skills) you would give to an aspiring data or AI leader aiming for the C-suite?
“Study literature. Read philosophy. Take an improv class. Do something that has nothing to do with technology.
“The leaders who reach the C-suite and stay there are not the ones with the deepest technical stack. They are the ones who can read a room, reframe a problem, and make a room full of skeptical executives feel the urgency of something they cannot yet see. That is a humanities skill. It is a storytelling skill. It is the ability to hold ambiguity without flinching and to find the human stakes inside a technical argument.
“My literature background shaped how I lead more than any certification I have earned. It taught me that the most powerful systems, such as organizations, cultures, transformations, run on narrative, not logic alone.
“Data tells you what happened. Story determines what happens next. Learn to tell the story because the C-suite is listening for it.”