Ben Gawiser

Ben Gawiser is Director of Software Engineering at Oracle, where he helps lead the company through the design and build-out of its next generation of cloud data centers. It is the latest turn in a career spent, by his own description, at the intersection where technology meets business — the rare place where the same person is comfortable whiteboarding a system and sitting in the boardroom. Gawiser has spent the last decade focused heavily on machine learning, AI, and analytics, and arrives at Oracle from a long run in startups. His enthusiasm for the field is not new: his hometown newspaper once interviewed his third-grade class about what they wanted to be, and his answer was "computer programmer."

That childhood answer held. Gawiser earned a computer science degree from Princeton and an MBA in information management from the University of Texas at Austin, then moved between consulting and a long string of startups. He ran software engineering and data science teams at Amazon, on the Amazon Business side, before being "dragged into one more startup" — most recently as VP of Engineering and Chief Security and Compliance Officer at Denim Health, and earlier as a data and engineering leader at companies including Smarter Sorting and RF Code. The throughline is consistent: building and leading technical teams in places where the engineering has to answer directly to the business.

Gawiser sees AI's clearest effect as a sharp lift in individual developer productivity — and a corresponding pull for engineers to move closer to the business. You no longer ask someone to "write a function that does this," he notes; you prompt a model for it, so the value shifts to understanding the larger context of what is being built. He is measured about the disruption. Hiring, he argues, has not fundamentally changed — "hire a good team and get out of their way" still holds — but roles will churn the way database administrators gave way to site reliability engineers. His metaphor for the moment: a sculptor moving from clay to a 3D printer, still making things, just far faster.

What keeps him up at night is not code but trust. Gawiser remembers the early internet's promise — that information would be free and lies easily disproven — and watched troll farms crush it. AI, he warns, will make misinformation dramatically worse: where spreading it once took rooms full of people, a single person can now write an agent that floods social media with millions of posts. He frames the guardrails for this technology as a conversation that belongs not to one country but to the whole species, and looks to Europe — GDPR, its digital-market rules — to lead the way as the United States follows. It is, he admits, a sentence with a lot of hope in it.