David Lee leads Applied AI Research & Development for Cox Communications. The team is focused on applying front-of-curve methods to accelerate the impact of AI across the company. As an advanced development team, they build pioneering applications to prove the effectiveness of AI to solve valuable problems. The team also deploys enterprise-wide AI tools that enable people to harness the power of AI for their daily work. Increasing general AI-fluency in the workforce is also a key priority. So, they cultivate learning communities across the company to help people prepare for the technical and social change that is ahead.
Prior to this work, he led early-stage startup incubation teams inside Cox’s New Growth team. David was previously the Vice President of Innovation and New Ventures for UPS. David was also the co-founder and head of Innovation Programs at SunTrust Bank (now Truist). His early career work at Bank of America included the launch of two startup teams inside the company touching wealth management, capital markets, payment cards, and strategic venture capital.
His TED talk, Why Jobs of the Future Won’t Feel Like Work, which addresses the need to reshape work for an age of intelligent machines, has more than 2 million views and was one of the 14 most watched TED talks of 2017. David is a frequent guest speaker on AI and innovation practices at Emory Goizueta Business School and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
David earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia. He has two school-aged sons and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.