Meet the Authors

Bobby joined Thomson Reuters in May 2022 to lead the TR Energy and Chemicals Industry. Prior to TR, Bobby spent 17 years at KPMG, where he served as the national Excise Tax practice leader, having delivered on excise and sales tax consulting, controversy, compliance and technology, including custom tax compliance and determination engagements. He is a recognized leader in the marketplace and brings a wealth of excise/sales tax experience and expertise to Thomson Reuters, with a specific focus on the oil and gas industry.

As a co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ceres Technology, Bobby is deeply committed to driving the company’s business and technology strategy forward. His journey is marked by continuous innovation and a relentless pursuit of excellence in the realms of data science and technology.
His decision to found Ceres Technology stemmed from his firsthand experience in supply chain. He previously founded a coffee importing business, sourcing green coffee from Central and South America and processing it in the United States. During this time, he encountered various challenges in the supply chain, including port congestion, geopolitical issues against the cartels, economic issues leading to supplier problems, weather, etc. Motivated by these experiences, he developed technology to address these issues. This solution not only benefitted his business but also proved valuable for many others, leading to the inception of Ceres Technology.

With 25+ years of tech industry experience, Brad Guilbault is the Global Senior Vice President and Head of Customer Innovation and Advisory at Icertis, the leading CLM vendor in the world. His career includes technology architecture and leadership at SAP, as well as sales and solution engineering roles at Microsoft, IBM, and Cirque du Soleil, with a background in integration, data and business intelligence.

Brad is passionate about leveraging technology to drive efficiency and innovation, particularly in solving real-world business challenges. He studied Computer Science and Management at McGill University in Canada. While his career has taken him around the world, Brad currently resides in Dallas, Texas, where he continues to drive innovation and excellence in the tech industry.

Brad Slocumb is the Business Owner of the Record-to-Report workstream for The Home Depot’s finance transformation.  The Home Depot’s transformation is a multi-year initiative centered around the implementation of SAP S/4 HANA.  To date, the R2R team has implemented, Central Finance, Group Reporting, Central Payments, and Treasury.   

Brendan is a highly motivated and results-oriented manager with a proven track record of driving change and achieving substantial business improvements. As a strong leader, he has successfully built effective teams that thrive in multicultural environments. He excels at engaging stakeholders from various parts of the business to collaborate towards achieving desired outcomes. With extensive experience in negotiation and a team-oriented approach, he possesses a well-rounded understanding of all facets of business and thrives in high-pressure situations.

His specialties lie in defining and implementing IT strategies, optimizing supply chain management, and driving finance initiatives. Additionally, he has a strong background in program management, enabling him to successfully oversee and execute complex projects. His combination of skills and expertise makes him a valuable asset in driving business growth and achieving organizational objectives.

Brent Schroeder

Strategic Technology and Product Development Executive

Brenton is an IT executive that specializes in customer experience transformation in the software industry powered by data and automation. Today, he is the Chief Customer Officer for Avantra, the industry-leading SAP landscape management, and automation solution where his team is focused on solving real-world IT operations problems for the Avantra global customer base.

At Avantra, Brenton’s team consistently delivers a fantastic customer experience allowing them to achieve a 3-year average CSAT of over 94% and an industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +54. Their success is down to Brenton’s data and automation-driven customer experience strategy to focus the team where it matters most.

Brenton has a deep technical background in computer science and has spent over a decade in IT consulting and software with a specific focus on SAP. He is a big believer that the best technology professionals have a mix of technical knowledge, industry experience, and empathy.

Brett has been the SBS Leadership & Capability Development Lead for over 7 years having previously supported Learning and Development at CBRE and for online marketplace platform LivingSocial. Brett brings with him fifteen years of experience in learning design and development, leadership development, facilitation, coaching, and implementing online learning solutions. He has helped SBS gain recognition with an award for Best Leadership Development Program at the Australian HR Awards in 2017 and again a further excellence award for Best Leadership Development Program at the 2022 Australian HR Awards. Brett is passionate about the innovative use of technology, virtual training and webinars, and e-learning solutions as part of a broader learning strategy, winning a LearnX gold awards in 2022 for induction/onboarding and compliance training courses. Brett holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre and Performance.  He is also an accredited DISC and Strengths Profile practitioner and an expert facilitator.

Brett is a highly skilled and accomplished Business Insight & Analytics Manager at Zespri International. With a wealth of experience and expertise in the field, he plays a pivotal role in driving data-driven decision-making and delivering actionable insights to support strategic initiatives.

Brian Jacobs is the Global Go-to-Market Lead for the SAP Analytics Partnership and Cortex in Google Cloud’s Strategic Pursuits Business Unit. In this role, he oversees Google Cloud’s Pre-Sales, Sales & Channels and Customer Success. Brian joined Google Cloud in 2022 to help expand Google’s SAP practice in North America, focusing on supporting joint customers with SAP cloud migration. He and his team created a new partner centric motion, drove growth across migrations and delivered signature Analytics wins. Prior to joining Google Cloud, Brian was Vice President Large Enterprise Consulting at Navisite, where he was responsible for leading their sales & partner teams. He also spent 13 years at SAP, leading North America Sales Teams in ERP Cloud, Procurement Cloud and Industry solutions. Over the course of his 15+ year career in enterprise software, Brian has actively participated in over 10 multinational transformation programs for Large Enterprise customers in Retail/CPG, HCLS and Manufacturing.

With more than 25 years of experience in consulting, business development, and practice leadership, I help organizations modernize operations, strengthen risk management, and unlock growth through large-scale transformation. My work spans ERP, cybersecurity, identity, and controls, with a focus on turning complex enterprise change into measurable business value. Today, I focus on the intersection of Trusted Applications and Trusted Agents—helping clients modernize platforms such as SAP S/4HANA while building the governance required for agentic AI to operate securely, intelligently, and at scale. Through KPMG’s frameworks, I help organizations embed AI-driven governance, adaptive controls, and autonomous assurance across enterprise applications, so innovation advances without compromising trust, security, or compliance. This lines up with your internal Trusted Agents positioning as a governed enterprise capability built across strategy, foundation, conversion, and ongoing operating model disciplines.

Brian Lee is a customer-focused application developer/system administrator with extensive experience in regulatory document control, enterprise content management, and intranet support.

Brian has worked in the IT industry for thirty years, across a variety of technical positions including Technical Pre-Sales roles with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SUSE, where he has been for the last five years. Across that time he has been involved in a number of SAP projects, dealing with aspects such as sizing, infrastructure design and high availability architecture.

Brian works as a Director in the North America Cloud Architecture & Advisory Team. In his current role Brian serves as an advisor for SAP’s strategic and Large Enterprise Customers to migrate and transform from traditional on-prem architectures to SAP RISE native architectures on Azure, AWS and GCP.

Prior to joining SAP Brian spent 12 years as an SAP customer supporting ERP systems as a Basis Administrator and Enterprise Architect for large complex system landscapes.

He has participated, led, designed, and architected full SAP application lifecycles and deployments.

Brian leads the product management team at Conexiom, delivering the best blend of tech and user experience to invoice and order automation. With extensive experience in AI and document automation gained at Thomson Reuters as well as innovation prowess gained working with hundreds of startups and during the rise and fall of BlackBerry, Brian brings agility and domain knowledge across dozens of industries to a long-standing problem. From AI to UX, and big data to insights and analytics, Conexiom’s product team puts users and customer business outcomes at the forefront of everything they do.

Bryce Gantt is an Analytics and Technologies professional with proven abilities to design, support and improve business analytics and data management. He has 25 years of information technology experience with 17 of those years devoted to analytics. His strong educational background allows him to work well across organizational boundaries providing business and technical alignment, project leadership, solution architecture, and product implementation on a wide range of software technologies, platforms, methodologies, and best practices. Bryce has successfully demonstrated these capabilities to highlight business opportunities as well as improve operations with more than 160+ clients, several of which were long-term and/or recurring engagements. Currently, he is responsible for delivering Syskoplan Reply’s analytics solutions using technologies from SAP, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.