Rossella Blatt Vital is Chief AI Officer at Lumen Technologies, leading the telecommunications company’s enterprise AI strategy and applied-AI organization. Her career spans medical diagnostics, assistive technology, retail personalization, enterprise software and the organizational demands of deploying AI at scale.
Originally from Italy, she studied arts and literature before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in telecommunications engineering at Politecnico di Milano and pursuing doctoral research in artificial intelligence. For her master’s dissertation, she developed an electronic-nose approach to lung-cancer detection, coordinating researchers, a cancer institute and an industrial manufacturer to investigate whether machine learning could identify disease-associated patterns in breath samples. She also researched brain-computer interfaces and assistive technology, including neural-signal-controlled spelling systems and wheelchairs.
Blatt Vital subsequently held senior data-science positions connected with Nordstrom, Trunk Club and Levi’s. By 2020, she was director of data science at Nordstrom Trunk Club, applying machine learning to personalization and customer understanding. Her approach to production data science emphasized stakeholder collaboration, reproducibility, code review and champion-challenger model evaluation: testing whether new models actually outperform established systems before increasing complexity.
At Sprout Social, she became vice president of engineering focused on AI and analytics. In 2025, she and Deepsha Menghani outlined an AI-first operating model for established software companies that must transform their products while continuing to deliver existing roadmaps. Their shared framework organizes that challenge around product strategy, working practices and people.
- AI-first transformation without abandoning the roadmap. Established companies must develop new AI-enabled customer experiences while maintaining existing products, revenue and delivery commitments. Learning-focused prototypes help teams test directions as technical possibilities change.
- Unified customer value across product silos. Effective AI experiences connect information across previously separate features and workflows instead of merely attaching isolated intelligent capabilities to individual products.
- Organization-wide AI fluency and T-shaped talent. Technical specialists need both deep expertise and the ability to prototype, collaborate across disciplines and build complete systems. Meanwhile, accessible tools and self-service platforms can help product, engineering and business teams experiment responsibly.
- Evaluation and human judgment in agentic systems. Reliable deployment depends on data quality, governance and meaningful evaluation, alongside leaders who recognize that organizational culture determines whether promising prototypes become useful products.
At Lumen, Blatt Vital is building applied-AI teams around customer outcomes and the infrastructure supporting an AI-driven economy.
