Carter Busse

Anthony Trask

Profile summary

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Carter Busse is a pioneering CIO with a 20+ year track record of leading high-growth companies through digital and AI-driven transformation. From being Salesforce’s first IT leader to guiding companies like MobileIron and Cohesity through IPOs and major transitions, Busse has consistently turned vision into execution.

At Workato, he now leads with an “automation-first” mindset, embedding AI and automation into the fabric of the enterprise. He oversees the automation of internal processes at Workato, including onboarding, procurement, and order-to-cash, integrating AI to unlock efficiency. Under his leadership, automation is not confined to IT but across marketing, HR, and customer success teams to build their own workflows, often aided by AI copilots.

Carter Busse is reshaping the cultural and operational playbook for intelligent enterprise transformation, making him a true AI Champion.

Connect with Carter on: Linkedin

Career highlights

2021

Chief Information Officer

2019

VP of IT

2015

VP of IT and business systems

2011

Senior Director, IT and Business Apps

2010

Senior Director of Data Center Ops

2000

Senior IT Manager

1996

IT Manager

1991

Senior consultant

Claim to fame

Building an “automation-first” mindset

Carter Busse has been a driving force behind AI and automation initiatives. Under his leadership, Workato uses its own automation platform to automate nearly every internal process from employee onboarding to procurement, and aggregating data across 70+ systems into a Snowflake data warehouse. Busse has championed a culture of “automation-first” thinking and plans to have a fully automated, zero-touch order-to-cash processes for customers soon.

Spearheading enterprise-wide transformations

Carter led large-scale digital transformation to transition the business from legacy client-server systems to a modern cloud-based app stack. This initiative not only doubled company revenue but also significantly reduced operating costs. To support this scale, he built a strategic IT organization, emphasizing performance, centralization, and agility and restructured IT support into an employee-focused, metrics-driven operation.

Carter's AI Philosophy

Carter Busse

CIO, Workato

“Implementing AI isn’t like implementing a big ERP or CRM that can last for months or years. You have to be incredibly flexible and be able to pivot quickly.” Source

“We’re increasing our spend with AI providers, mainly foundational [large language models] and also some enterprise search tools as well.” Source

“Architecture is key. So, you set up the right infrastructure in a secure place to let people iterate in a safe place—that takes a lot of architecture. You don’t want stuff being put into production that these guys built and break. Who gets the first call? It’s IT.” Source