Embracing AI as a Leader
Joe White shares how he's encouraging others to immerse themselves in AI as the CEO of a global vision AI company and the newest member of the mpd² Industry Advisory Board.
Joe White spent 25 years at Zebra Technologies, including the last three as Chief Product and Solutions Officer. In that role, he oversaw the strategy, development, and commercialization of the company’s hardware, software, automation solutions, and services—spanning an array of fields, from retail, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, government, and healthcare.
White loved the variety but watched closely as AI began reshaping every one of those industries. Wanting to be at the center of that shift, he made a move: in November 2025, White became CEO of Everseen, a global vision AI company that builds real-time computer-vision systems so retailers can improve checkout accuracy and reduce losses from mis-scanned or unscanned items.
“The best thing to do right now is embrace AI and start leveraging the technology today,” White said. “It's not going away, so get engaged with it, leverage it, use it. Your best opportunity to learn is to be immersed in it.”
White is sharing that message with students in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd²) program as the newest member of the program's Industry Advisory Board (IAB).
White's role with the IAB is to ensure what mpd² students learn is relevant to business needs. The AI boom is creating new opportunities for students to capitalize on knowledge learned in the program and become the type of leaders organizations need.
Students who take advantage of those opportunities will graduate with exactly the skills White looks for when he hires.
“I look for intellectual creativity,” he said. “The ability for a worker to actually reimagine what five years from now looks like is the value point, the ability to reimagine how something operates or how things work in the future.”
These skills become even more valuable as AI makes it possible for the average employee to generate previously time-consuming, code-driven outputs from business systems.
Freed from the mundane, tomorrow’s leaders will need to thrive in less structured positions, he said.
“The definition of roles and how workers interact and what they do becomes a lot more fluid and a lot more interesting,” White said. “If information gets democratized by AI, then the importance of having more creative workers who can actually think outside the box and give different perspectives becomes much more valuable.”
White's focus on the IAB is to ensure the curriculum gives students real room to develop into those leaders. He is excited to have opportunities to interact with students and share knowledge from his 30-plus-year career.
“Students will get out of the program what they put into it,” he said. “They should get engaged and interact with the board members and the leaders who come and speak. That's their chance to learn, grow, and accelerate their career.”
White sees his latest career move as his own version of acceleration, making a deliberate bet on the technology he believes will define what comes next.
Everseen is transforming retail with vision AI, helping more than half of the world’s largest grocery retailers save millions of dollars every month. Deployed across 150,000 checkouts and 10,000 stores worldwide, Everseen’s solutions detect and prevent loss in real time at the self-checkout and store aisles—reducing shrink, improving operational efficiency, and elevating the customer experience.
At the core of that effort is AI—a lesson he plans to reinforce on the IAB and with mpd² students.
“I've embraced AI wholeheartedly,” White said. “The amount of intelligence and capability that's happening around AI technology today is pretty exciting.”