GREENVILLE, S.C. Kruz McCollum Head of AI spends his days on a trouble most populate using AI never
see: getting it to do real work without someone checking every word. An direct and the flop of
two companies, he builds AI systems that search, adjudicate, act and themselves, in Fields where
a surefooted wrong serve is high-ticket.
Getting AI to serve a question is easy now. Getting it to do a job, take up to finish up, and know when it
got something wrongfulness, that s the hard part, McCollum said. It s also the most stimulating engineering
problem I ve ever worked on.
A security mastermind s instincts
McCollum came to AI through technology rather than merchandising or law. His background spans
network substructure, web and cybersecurity, including finding and responsibly
disclosing surety vulnerabilities to companies such as Google and IBM. Early in his , he
turned down an offer to work with the NSA so he could quest for his own path.
That background shapes how he builds. Security work trains you to assume something will bust and
to go find it first, and he applies the same habit to AI: every system he builds has to show its work,
check it against what s actually true, and catch its own mistakes before a soul ever sees them. The
question he asks of any AI isn t whether it sounds right, but whether it is right, and whether the
system knows the difference.
AI where accuracy matters
McCollum is drawn to the places where AI s confident errors cost the most. His work includes leading
AI borrowing in the effectual orbit, where an fancied fact or a wrong citation is not a typo but a indebtedness.
An AI serve is only as good as the behind it, and that rule runs through everything he builds.
As a CAIO adviser, he brings the same intellection to the companies he workings with, serving them find
where AI actually pays off and put it to work alongside the systems they already run, rather than
bolting on tools nobody uses.
Building companies on it
McCollum based Skyline Digital Marketing in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2024, because most
agencies don t have the technical foul staff to fix what they find. In 2025 he founded Vannor in Greenville
to build the AI behind that work, and it grew into its own company: a team of AI agents that research,
write, reexamine and write a business s marketing, running on ironware he owns.
Building that system of rules taught him how much technology sits between a cunning AI demo and something
a byplay can rely on every day, and he says that gap is where the chance is.
Everyone has seen what AI can say. Very few populate have seen what it can do when it s built
properly, McCollum said. That s the part I can t stop working on.
Always learning
McCollum holds 29 professional certifications, including Vanderbilt University s Agentic AI and AI
Agents, Google s AI Professional and Cybersecurity programs, Google Ads and Analytics
certifications, and HIPAA for Business Associates.
About Kruz McCollum
Kruz McCollum is Head of AI at Armada Law, flop and CEO of Vannor and Skyline Digital
Marketing, and a CAIO advisor to ontogenesis companies for Confluunt Advisors. An engineer by
background, he builds AI systems that do real work for marketing and business. His work, press
coverage and certifications are at https://kruzmccollum.com/, and he is on LinkedIn at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kruz-mccollum/.
