About Thomas
A business-first technology leader — 30 years in the arena.
I'm a business-first technology leader and Chief Technology Officer with a 30-year track record spent in the trenches of multi-site retail, complex supply chains, and military technology command. My focus has never been on chasing the latest tech trends or leading expensive, high-risk system overhauls — it's on making the investments a company has already made run reliably, efficiently, and with clear ROI.
Having managed technology footprints across thousands of retail stores, I know that software and infrastructure only matter if they make life easier for frontline associates, supply chain teams, and customers. I build high-performing, accountable IT organizations that work shoulder-to-shoulder with Merchandising, Marketing, Operations, and Finance — stabilizing point-of-sale systems, paying down technical debt, and negotiating hard with vendors to protect the bottom line.
Much of that work is global. I have extensive managed-services experience building and running offshore and nearshore teams across India, the Philippines, and Vietnam — and I negotiate and manage the vendor relationships behind enterprise IT: major mobile carriers, network and connectivity providers, MSPs, and platform vendors. These are contracts where I've taken millions out of recurring cost — decommissioning national POTS and MPLS lines for $12M in annual savings and consolidating vendors to cut support cost double digits. I'm also an expert at the independent technology, team, and process reviews that tell a leadership team what's actually working, what isn't, and what to fix first.
Selected experience
VP, Infrastructure & Operations — Fortune 500 National Retailer
Led a 400-person technical organization; built a multi-year $154M network and edge modernization plan and identified $80M in structural savings. Rationalized telecom and legacy contracts for $12M in recurring annual savings, stood up a 24/7 enterprise NOC, and piloted agentic AI workflows in internal support.
VP, Infrastructure & Operations — Academy Sports + Outdoors
Owned operations, infrastructure engineering, and business continuity for a 120-person corporate team plus 300+ partners. Cut POS incidents 40% in six months, shrank the primary data center footprint 45% under FinOps governance, and achieved >95% verified failover for Tier 0/1 systems.
Chief Technology Officer — DataDefense Partners
Executive technology consulting, infrastructure design, and risk management across manufacturing, healthcare, and retail distribution — including greenfield IT/security blueprints for high-speed pharmaceutical production facilities supporting 900+ staff.
Chief Technology Officer — Visionworks
Led technology transformation on a $25M budget with a 75-person team — migrating legacy core systems to AWS/Azure and establishing Agile delivery that lifted release velocity 65% and halved defect rates.
Director of IT Operations — H-E-B Grocery
Directed daily operations, engineering support, and disaster recovery — elevating critical store and pharmacy application availability from an unstable mid-80% baseline to a steady 99.9% uptime while maintaining HIPAA/HITRUST compliance.
Earlier — IBM Global Services & U.S. Air Force
Global consultant for enterprise logistics at IBM Global Services, and a Space Command IT & communications specialist in the U.S. Air Force (NORAD HQ, Peterson AFB).
Thought leadership
Published author on strategy and technology in the age of AI:
Speaking
Recent talks and keynotes:
- Everyone Is a Genius Now
- GRIT — Girls Reimagining Tomorrow
- Why Hire a Veteran?
Everyone's a Genius Now — That's the Problem — Thomas Ahl's keynote: when anyone can generate anything, judgment becomes the only currency left — why the human in the loop is your business insurance, not your bottleneck.
Certifications & education
Network certifications and additional credentials in progress.
Hands-on with the tools
Not certificates on a wall — the AI platforms I actually build and ship with. The Ahlchemy studio below is a working portfolio of apps built with them, plus AI delivered on the AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms I'm certified in.
Undergraduate coursework in Physics and Computer Science, Southeastern Oklahoma State University.
About the studio
A registered company, built to make things worth keeping.
Ahlchemy is a registered authoring company — family-founded, and run as a small, fully remote team. There's no corporate office: the creators, developers, QA, and support who make and maintain everything here work distributed, held together by one standard — be clear, be useful, and be worth someone's time. It's also, at heart, a family effort: run by Thomas, built in partnership with my three kids alongside homeschooling them, and carrying works from my wife and my sister too.
It started at the kitchen table
Most of what Ahlchemy makes began as something we needed at home. Homeschooling three kids turns you into a builder — you want a way to track the year, a lesson that finally clicks, a game for a rainy afternoon, a reason to sit down and write. So we build them, test them on the toughest audience there is (our own children), and share the ones that earn their keep. The kids aren't just who a lot of this is for — they're part of how it gets made. In fact, several of the works were made by the kids themselves, ages six to ten, learning to design, write, and ship real things as part of how we homeschool — you can see what they're building and learning here.
Why the range
Most of what Ahlchemy makes starts as a real need — a homeschool day that needs structure, a family that wants an easier way to stay in touch, a game night that needs a spark, an idea that belongs in a book. Rather than force every idea through one narrow lane, the studio builds the right thing for the job: a full K–5 curriculum, a family messenger, a party game, a boating companion, a recruiter platform, alongside books and original music. The breadth isn't a lack of focus — it's the point of a studio.
A remote-first company
Ahlchemy runs the way a lot of good things get built now — remotely. No headquarters and no commute; a distributed team of developers and QA who build and test the software, and back-office people who keep things running and answer when you reach out. Family members create many of the works themselves — the kids included — and the team turns them into things dependable enough to put a name on.
What you can count on
It's built and QA-tested. Nothing here is spun up and abandoned — a real team builds, tests, and maintains it. You can try before you buy. Many of the apps run free in your browser, so you use the real thing first. There's a team to reach. Questions and feedback go straight to thomas@ahlchemy.org, and they get answered.
The mark
The Ahlchemy seal goes on everything the studio makes. It's a small promise: that whatever it's on — a page, a track, or a screen — was made with care and meant to last. That's the whole idea behind the name.