Innovation Lessons from Nike and Amex

[00:00:00] Elaine Barsoom: We’re asking the wrong questions. Before—particularly at Nike—before we started any conversation, we didn’t ask, “How do we use AI?” which a lot of CEOs right now are mandating.

[00:00:15] Elaine Barsoom: We asked, “What problem are we trying to solve, and can AI help?”

[00:00:19] Elaine Barsoom: And so, when you walk into a room with senior leaders, you need to answer those questions. What problems do we need to solve at a mass scale in a perfect science organization?

[00:00:30] Elaine Barsoom: And then, once you realize where the friction points are and what problems we are solving at a mass scale, then you can apply AI. Then you can actually incorporate it. But what are the workflows? Where can we redesign? Where does AI fit into that?

[00:00:43] Elaine Barsoom: Just putting a tool on top of a tool just incurs more technical debt. So, I think that’s super important as all companies now have a mandate regarding where they’re going to incorporate AI. Don’t just do AI for AI’s sake.

[00:00:51] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. And behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to the Bridgecast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies, the nation’s leading tech advisory firm. Experience a better way—the Bridgepointe way.

[00:01:26] Scott Kinka: Hi, and welcome to the Bridgecast. We’re super excited to have you with us today. I’m joined by Elaine Barsoum. She’s a Venture Partner at Silicon Foundry and a recognized leader in AI and corporate innovation. She spent 20 years helping businesses marry strategy and next-gen technologies.

[00:01:46] Scott Kinka: She was most recently Global Head of Tech Innovation, Partnerships, and Strategy at Nike. Her resume also includes time in leadership at American Express. She’s driven innovation across multiple sectors: retail, fintech, and hospitality. I’m super excited to get into all of that. Today, we’re going to be diving into innovation, adoption, where we really are with AI, and how all this can ultimately drive growth. Elaine, welcome to the Bridgecast.

[00:02:11] Elaine Barsoom: Hi, Scott. Great to be here.

[00:02:13] Scott Kinka: Certainly. So first off, how did I do?

[00:02:16] Elaine Barsoom: I think you did okay. Yeah.

[00:02:18] Scott Kinka: Did I miss anything important?

[00:02:20] Elaine Barsoom: Well, it’s the “filler.” I grew up as a first-generation daughter of Egyptian immigrants. My father built many businesses, so I like to say that maybe I sometimes follow in his footsteps. I actually started my career studying International Affairs. At that point, I thought I would go into policy at the World Bank; I was really interested in systems at scale.

[00:03:00] Elaine Barsoom: But I got great advice from a mentor after graduate school who said, “Actually, the private sector is where the biggest levers are.” That moment really shaped me and my career. Following seeing my father build businesses, I actually thought I would follow in his footsteps. He wanted me to take over his business before he passed in 2011, and I had to deliberate for a long time as to whether that was my pathway.

[00:03:30] Elaine Barsoom: While I had enormous respect for him, I knew I was really drawn to the frontier of innovation and technology. So, I went back to American Express and built an e-commerce venture. That decision really runs through my career—being at that forefront of enterprise innovation and technology.

[00:03:46] Scott Kinka: I got it. So, what was it like making the decision to not follow the family business to chase innovation?

[00:03:52] Elaine Barsoom: That was a challenging one, particularly at the time. But my father had always been my biggest supporter and mentor. He knew that passion drove everything in my career and my life. So, he definitely respected and saw the opportunity for me, knowing that I’d be much more impactful in that respect.

[00:04:19] Scott Kinka: I love that. So, where are you located right now? Where are we talking from?

[00:04:23] Elaine Barsoom: I’m in New York, in Brooklyn in particular. I’ve lived in New York for over 30 years and I love it here. We’re just at the epicenter of many different industries. I would like to say innovation here is next to what’s happening in technology in Silicon Valley.

[00:04:43] Scott Kinka: That’s awesome. I have a daughter in Cobble Hill, by the way. We were just there over the weekend for the half-marathon, and she ran, which is awesome.

[00:04:51] Elaine Barsoom: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s great.

[00:04:53] Scott Kinka: We had a great time. I love the area. So, let’s do this: before we get into the questions I’m loaded with, let me ask you a general one. We got through your background and your experience, and I’m looking for a little bit of that definition beyond the resume. Can you think of a moment—maybe it was the one you just gave, so maybe you beat me to it—that you’ll look back on that defined your current approach to technology and business growth?

[00:05:28] Elaine Barsoom: Yeah, it started really early on. Right after business school—back in February after September 11th—I went to work for American Express. I was on the marketing and acquisition side of the business. One of my first initiatives was actually to work with a startup called Digitas back then and to embed it within our marketing department.

[00:06:05] Elaine Barsoom: I remember how intrigued I was by how a small startup can drive such great impact within an enterprise. It was really where my career took off. I knew that I was the “builder” who sat between startups, emerging technology, and corporate innovation. That was really one of the defining moments in my career.

[00:06:28] Scott Kinka: I love that. Like I said in the pre-show, I have 15 questions written for you and I’m not going to follow any of them. I’m already off-script. But walk me through that, because for those who follow the Bridgecast, they know what I do for a living. At Bridgepointe Technologies, we represent 300-some technology suppliers. Some are the big ones you’d expect, and then some are companies where we think, “That’s really interesting.”

[00:06:45] Scott Kinka: But oftentimes you run into the challenge where innovation and security—and I don’t just mean technical security; I mean fiscal and operational security—are challenging for larger or mid-market businesses to buy. You just said you bridged that. Give some advice: if you were an IT leader looking at something young and innovative, how do you decide what’s too close to the “razor’s edge” versus where you can trust and embrace it?

[00:07:33] Elaine Barsoom: Well, first, you develop an incredible relationship with your legal, governance, and IT folks. You bring them on the pathway. That’s such an important point that I think we sometimes miss. I’ve evaluated hundreds of tools for Nike, American Express, and a number of different startups for “enterprise readiness.”

[00:07:55] Elaine Barsoom: Once you develop processes and systems with your cross-functional teams, then you can go in and really understand what problem you were trying to solve and figure out which companies can actually solve it. Are they ready? Do they have the enterprise readiness? That is one of the most important questions you have to ask early on to any company you’re trying to work with.

[00:08:20] Elaine Barsoom: On the corporate side, it’s about defining what risk is. How much risk can we take? Knowing when to push the boundaries and when we really want to protect our IP is key. When is it okay to say, “This is not really core to our company, and we need to accelerate in this particular field”?

[00:08:54] Scott Kinka: So Elaine, do you think it’s important for an IT leader and the legal leader—which in many businesses is sometimes the CFO who also owns legal—to have an agreed-upon framework in advance of bringing in a particular technology? Or is it just something we talk about on a case-by-case basis?

[00:09:18] Elaine Barsoom: No, 100%. You have to walk in with systems. You have to have a system in place. The system can change—it can be iterated—but you have to have a framework as to what’s core and what’s not, where you want to take risks and where you don’t, and what kind of big problems you’re trying to solve. You end up spending more time and resources if you walk into every conversation as if it’s a restart.

[00:09:52] Scott Kinka: Alright, now apply that to AI for me. Right now, we’re just running and doing things. Talk to me about governance, planning, and corporate edicts around what we want to accomplish on the AI side. We meet with CIOs and IT leaders all the time, and nine out of ten times, I’ve got someone who says, “I just got told to go do some AI. I don’t really know what that means, but I have to go get some because that’s what the board or the CEO wants.” Talk to me about planning and governance in AI.

[00:10:31] Elaine Barsoom: I would say we’re asking the wrong questions. Particularly at Nike, before we started any conversation, we didn’t ask “How do we use AI?” which a lot of CEOs are mandating. We asked, “What problem are we trying to solve, and can AI help?” When you walk into a room with senior leaders, you need to answer those questions. What problems do we need to solve at a mass scale?

[00:11:00] Elaine Barsoom: Once you realize where the friction points are, then you can apply AI. Then you can actually incorporate it. But what are the workflows? Where can we redesign? Just putting a tool on top of a tool just incurs more technical debt. That’s super important, as all companies now have a mandate to incorporate AI. Don’t just do AI for AI’s sake.

[00:11:34] Scott Kinka: One challenge we find is the shift in the CIO role post-pandemic. In a lot of businesses, the CIO is seen as “the plumber”—and I mean that in the nicest way possible. We put in a CRM, and as long as everybody can log in, we hand it to the line of business and walk out. The visibility on the big problems to solve is usually not in the CIO’s bucket unless the problem is connectivity or scale. How does a CIO bridge that gap when they have a corporate edict but no pile of business problems to solve?

[00:12:48] Elaine Barsoom: The best way to start is with an example of how we did it at Nike. We started our journey really early on with the business. We mapped where the current state workflows were. We asked, “What’s that current end-to-end state workflow? Where does the friction lie?”

[00:13:15] Elaine Barsoom: Then we did an exercise as a team: what could the optimal future state look like? If we were redesigning or removing capabilities, what does that look like? By doing that cross-functional exercise, you’re redesigning around the human side rather than just bringing on a tool. You want to make sure adoption is part of it.

[00:14:00] Elaine Barsoom: When you drive with the business, engineering, and legal all as part of the decision, you have a much higher success rate for adoption. You design something that’s actually going to be used. I would encourage any CIO to spend time with the business outlining it before even looking at tools.

[00:14:30] Elaine Barsoom: A pure example was when we were launching GitHub Copilot within Nike. We thought, “Okay, we’re going to turn this on; this will be quite easy.” But we found that adoption was pretty low initially. We had to do a lot of training, interviewing to find the best use cases, and adopting best practices. When we launched those trainings and brought in a “champions program,” the success was much higher. That was the redesign with the actual engineers who were using it.

[00:15:20] Scott Kinka: I love the idea of building literacy up before trying to solve chunky problems. You mentioned GitHub Copilot—every business has users who are going and doing stuff on their own. Did you guys have to contend with that too? It’s early 2026 as we’re recording this; how far back did you guys bite the bullet and offer a model for everyone to use?

[00:16:13] Elaine Barsoom: It didn’t start initially across the whole organization. Yes, when you have fear within an organization, hesitation spreads faster than any tool. People go and try new things on their own because of the fear of being disrupted or displaced. You end up with a security problem of people using unauthorized tools. Every organization, including Nike, deals with that.

[00:16:59] Scott Kinka: So, the first step is to figure out where everybody is and bring them in? Those people could be your champions.

[00:17:06] Elaine Barsoom: Exactly. That is exactly what we did—finding those people and getting them to be champions. You have to do two things: it has to come from the top down because it’s a mandate, but it also has to build from the bottom up. Who are the people “hands-on-keyboard” actually doing this work?

[00:17:30] Scott Kinka: Figure out how to support them or get them to be the champions.

[00:17:32] Elaine Barsoom: And build community structures that understand and operate. Then, all of a sudden, you’re not just pushing a literacy program; it’s creating itself. That’s sustainable.

[00:17:52] Scott Kinka: It’s almost like we prepped for this, only we didn’t! I let you tell it because I was about to ask about responsibility and sustainability. You addressed the first one—if it’s a top-down edict and a bottom-up build based on solving your security problem, it’s so simple. It’s almost obvious, but we have a tendency in this industry to never release new technology that way.

[00:18:45] Scott Kinka: Let’s take the other one: responsibility regarding personnel. This is the first time there have been five generations in a workforce. Now we’re building a transformative approach around AI—which you could almost consider the sixth generation. Did you consider this generational aspect in your rollout plans? How do you think about responsibility in AI?

[00:19:15] Elaine Barsoom: I would say yes and no. You might think this newer generation would be the first to adopt and drive change. Interestingly, that’s not quite the case. It’s often the people who are experienced and have the tribal knowledge who actually know how to prompt these tools. They have the contextual understanding. I really come back to the people and the human aspect of it, not just the technology. We found early on that the folks with years and years of history can actually use these tools best.

[00:20:22] Scott Kinka: I love your point about context. For some people, LLMs are magic. But it’s all context-based and referential. Right now, it’s not meant to be self-referential—that’s when the robots take over. Context is required to be referential, so you have to have tribal knowledge to take advantage of a self-service AI tool to the max.

[00:20:56] Elaine Barsoom: Think about it: does the tool actually envelope the actual workflow and the intelligence? Intelligence lives outside the tool. If you think of any customer service operation, they have years of history working with customers. You can’t just apply an agent and think you’re diving into the workflow. You have to learn about all the tribal knowledge gained over the years: how customers like to be talked to and what the biggest pain points are. That is value through learning.

[00:21:47] Scott Kinka: And there are also the guardrails. We’ve heard horror stories of just activating bots. If you educate them on call recordings, it assumes the agents were all doing the right thing in the first place! Are we sleeping on the customer experience (CX) advantages of using AI? CX vendors were the first to talk about it, but now all the hype is in personal productivity. Has the productivity side taken over from the good work that should be getting done in customer operations?

[00:22:36] Elaine Barsoom: I think so, because it’s the most obvious use case to start with. You never want to launch something you feel is not ready. But if you design for the customer experience and personalize it, that’s where you’re really unlocking competitive advantage. I was talking to someone working with Lowe’s—a really incredible example.

[00:23:05] Elaine Barsoom: Lowe’s built an AI operating system around three principles: how we work, how we sell, and how we shop. One of the shopping assistants they launched was called “Lowe’s Milo.” It basically helps you imagine redoing your kitchen. You take a photo, and it reimagines how it would look with products you can actually buy and find in stock at your local store. They found that it converted at twice the rate of those who didn’t use it. They used AI to drive a customer experience based on years of data and infrastructure.

[00:24:33] Scott Kinka: That’s a super cool use case. They didn’t have to invent the “visualize the room” piece—that was already in the public models—but they married the public model to their structured back-end data and customer signals. Do you have any other stories like that?

[00:25:10] Elaine Barsoom: Have you heard of Wingstop, the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant)? My kids love it; it’s a huge rage on Instagram. For years, they were operating on paper tickets, and you would wait 40 minutes for an order. The CEO built what’s called the “Smart Kitchen System.”

[00:25:50] Elaine Barsoom: They used an AI-driven model that collected hundreds of data points to forecast how much product each restaurant would need every 15 minutes. Then he built a system that gamified the visual cues for the “back of the house” rather than using text-heavy instructions. He piloted it with a few franchisees in Texas and showed they could reduce wait times by almost 50%. He let the math do the selling to the rest of the franchises and put it in place overnight. He designed for the human, showed the math, and solved for governance before they scaled.

[00:27:28] Scott Kinka: That’s a crazy story. What struck me is the demonstrable ROI—ticket times reduced, period. On the flip side, we were talking about personal productivity earlier. In a desk job, it’s never about the number of “widgets” like it is with how fast the chicken gets out. Do we have mechanisms for measuring productivity yet that will meet AI in the workplace?

[00:28:38] Elaine Barsoom: Many consulting organizations have come out with their own measures, but every organization is different. You can measure how long it takes to complete certain tasks. We did this at Nike—how long did it take to complete this task before AI versus with AI? Simple things like legal summarizing a document. But if you have more time, do you devote all of that to increasing productivity? Probably not.

[00:29:43] Scott Kinka: Yeah, in a work-from-home environment, I’ve been dying to ask: if an AI-powered dev gets thousands of lines of code out in two hours and then goes to play Call of Duty, while the next person takes 12 hours to do the same, who’s the better employee in our current ethos? I don’t know that we’re prepared to grapple with that yet. It’s a warning to businesses: when you roll these things out, what do you expect people to do?

[00:30:38] Elaine Barsoom: But how much are you investing in that human to upskill them? You can deploy a tool and give them training and SOPs, but if you’re not investing in the actual best practices and upskilling, you have a problem.

[00:31:12] Scott Kinka: I completely agree. Is it optional? Is it an expectation? It’s like communication expectations in hybrid work—which medium should I use for an immediate response? Teams? Email? We could talk about that for half an hour.

[00:31:47] Elaine Barsoom: Definitely. I was reading a “2026 State of the Workplace” report that said focus efficiency has dropped to 60%, but collaboration has surged 34% and multitasking has climbed 12%. People are busier, but not necessarily more effective. Work is accelerating faster than the systems to manage it.

[00:32:28] Scott Kinka: No question. Alright, one last heady question, then some fun. It’s clear why you’ve been so effective sitting between the business and the technologists. If you’re a CIO or a Director of IT listening to this and they don’t have an “Elaine Barsoom” to bridge that gap, what’s the one piece of advice you’d give them?

[00:33:08] Elaine Barsoom: Become the person who asks the questions. Understand where the friction is, understand the workflows, and be the forward-thinker. All of our jobs are changing. Understand where coordination breaks down—make the invisible visible so that you can reverse-redesign for that organizational structure.

[00:33:41] Scott Kinka: Such good advice. Wise words. Alright, we’re going to rip through some fun, Elaine. Ready?

[00:34:02] Scott Kinka: First, give me one bold prediction about AI that might surprise people for the next 12 months.

[00:34:05] Elaine Barsoom: For decades, enterprise security has been built around securing humans—logins, identity, access. AI agents are going to start outnumbering humans. We’ll have agents negotiating with agents and agents monitoring agents.

[00:34:29] Scott Kinka: “Agents in the org chart”—that’s how we’ll title that. I like it. Give me a contrarian opinion about AI in the workplace that others in the industry might push back on.

[00:34:43] Elaine Barsoom: Most AI governance frameworks are “theater.” They’re designed around compliance and risk, not around how people actually behave when their roles are uncertain. A framework is just a document; if nobody follows the policy, you’re not actually changing anything.

[00:35:16] Scott Kinka: I hear you on that. I like it. Two fun ones: what are you reading or listening to right now that’s a good tip?

[00:35:44] Elaine Barsoom: A great book by Donella Meadows called Thinking in Systems. She uses simple examples like bathtubs and thermostats to explain how complex systems behave. It challenges the idea that these are technology problems—they’re actually system design problems.

[00:36:12] Scott Kinka: I love that. Last one: you’re in a dystopian future at the end of the world. Your phone is still working, but only one app is functioning. Which one and why?

[00:36:35] Elaine Barsoom: This one’s easy for me: the Bible app.

[00:36:42] Scott Kinka: Great. If you’re alone in the world, you should probably be talking to your Lord and Savior at that point! Makes perfect sense. Elaine, where can our listeners find out more about you?

[00:37:00] Elaine Barsoom: I work with mid-market organizations and leaders today. You can find me on LinkedIn (Elaine Barsoum) or my website, waveco.ai.

[00:37:11] Scott Kinka: Awesome. Elaine, I’m looking forward to bringing you back at some point. I can’t believe the 40 minutes is already up.

[00:37:23] Elaine Barsoom: Thank you so much!

[00:37:25] Scott Kinka: And that is a wrap on this episode of the Bridgecast. If today’s conversation gave you something to think about, hit subscribe, leave us a review, and share with your team. We’ll see you soon.