Drew Conrad

Applied AI for higher education and the workplace.

I spent twenty years building enterprise AI. Now I help institutions and the people inside them actually use it, on stage, in workshops, and in the research.

Researcher. Builder. Speaker. Cancer survivor.

The Build

Twenty years building AI and digital engagement systems inside contact centers, scaling them across the enterprise, and eventually leading the companies that build them. The arc begins on the phones at AT&T in 1999 and runs through senior project management, senior product management, product leadership at XSELL Technologies, and into the C-suite as Chief Operating Officer at Consumer Opportunity and Chief Executive Officer at apoge.io.

Along the way the through-line never really changed. Systems that put intelligent tooling behind the people doing the work, measured longitudinally, rolled out across tens of thousands of agents and dozens of sites. The titles moved; the questions stayed the same. How do you build something that makes a human better at their job. How do you prove it worked. How do you scale it without losing the humans in the middle.

Chief Executive Officer, apoge.io
2024 - 2026
Co-founded and led an AI tooling company built on the premise that AI should empower people, not replace them.
Chief of Staff & Head of Customer Success, XSELL Technologies
2019 - 2023
Scaled contact center technology implementations from 1,200 agents at 6 centers to more than 20,000 agents at over 50 centers globally.
Senior Manager, Product Management & Digital Engagement, AT&T
2014 - 2019
Designed and shipped CoBot, a human-augmentation AI program for 25,000 agents that lifted conversion over 10% and contributed a +$100M lifetime-value gain.
View full professional history on my CV →

The Detour

In late 2019, I was diagnosed with bone cancer. For four years I fought through radiation, chemo, and uncertainty, at one point working from a portable desk while bed-bound for six months. In 2022 I was told to prepare for the worst.

In September 2023, I quit my job and started living. I hiked the Santa Monica Mountains, visited the U.S.S. Iowa, watched a SpaceX launch. Thirty days later, my medical team called with news of an emerging gene therapy treatment.

I am now cancer-free, for the final time. I walked away with a profound appreciation for life and a renewed sense of purpose.

The Rebuild

Speaking & Training

Most AI rollouts fail the same way. A VP reads a deck, procurement signs a contract, and the workforce gets a 30-minute training on how to ask a chatbot for an Excel formula. People walk away thinking AI is the chat box, and the anxiety does more damage than the tools do good.

I help institutions and teams get past that, with talks that make sense of where this is actually going and training that builds the skill the 30-minute version skips.

See speaking →

Surviving was the beginning, not the end. What came after runs in three directions that feed each other: the speaking and education work, the research, and the building.

The headline work now is applied. I spent twenty years inside enterprise AI, and the most useful thing I do with that experience is help universities and workplaces use these tools without losing the humans in the middle. The clearest example is research I conducted for the University System of Georgia eCampus and presented at GeorgiaView 2026: an adversarial study of whether AI can beat secured online exams, and a two-line defense that holds. Read the eCampus research →

The research half goes deeper. In 2025 I entered the Consciousness and Society PhD program at the University of West Georgia, a program that treats psychology as a human science grounded in humanistic, critical, and transpersonal traditions. My research question sits at the intersection of that tradition and the tools I spent twenty years building: what emerges when AI agents are governed by psychological need hierarchies rather than reward functions? Project Emergence is the active simulation where those questions get tested.

The third direction is building. ECHOIT, founded in 2026, is an AI development orchestration platform that turns Claude Code into a governed software development team, designed and built end-to-end using AI as the primary build tool and directed by two decades of product practice. It is one credential among several, and it keeps my hands on the tools I teach others to use.

The rebuild is also a commitment to the next generation. I serve as Scoutmaster of Troop 113 in Rome, Georgia, a third-generation Eagle Scout passing that legacy forward, and I coach the 100 Black Men of Rome's Kemet Robotics FLL team, mentoring young engineers in robot design, programming, and professional presentation. On a day-to-day basis, those roles are as important as anything else on this page.

As presented to
Speaker & AI Educator
2026 - Present
Talks and workshops on applied AI for higher education and the workplace. Research for USG eCampus presented at GeorgiaView 2026.
Doctoral Student, UWG Consciousness and Society
2025 - 2028 (In Progress)
Researching emergent behavior in AI agents governed by Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Founder, ECHOIT
2026 - Present
AI development orchestration platform, built end-to-end with AI as the primary development tool.
View full academic CV → Research program → Full service record →

Education

University of West Georgia
Doctor of Philosophy, Psychology: Consciousness and Society (2025 - 2028, In Progress)
Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management
Product Development and Leadership Series
University of Nebraska at Kearney
BS, Sociology and Women's Studies
Project Emergence Writings Curriculum Vitae LinkedIn ECHOIT