Stephen Ecker is the Chief Data Officer at Trinity Industries, where he has spent 13 years and founded the company's analytics function. He built the team from a group of interns into a strategic capability that has driven over $100 million in measurable business impact.

Throughout our conversation, Stephen returned to a single conviction: the data layer is the strategy. Not the model, not the agent, not the dashboard. The foundation.

Aly McGue: Enterprise leaders often weigh the cost of fully transforming their infrastructure against the cost of not modernizing. How did you approach this, and why was data fragmentation ultimately so costly?

Stephen Ecker: It wasn't just an IT problem. It was a strategic ceiling for us. We had workloads bouncing between Azure and AWS, back to on-prem. Every model we deployed had its own serving setup. Nothing was standardized. We had an on-premises SQL warehouse where you'd run a query overnight on car location data, come back the next morning, realize you'd made a mistake, and have to run it again the next night. That's two days to answer one question.