Jody Claggett

I still remember the first time I joined two tables in SQL. Something clicked — not just technically, but in me. I realized I could build things that answered real questions for real people, and suddenly I had agency in my career that I hadn't felt before. I've been chasing that feeling for 25 years.

Today I manage a diverse team at Vail Health that spans data engineering, interface architecture, database administration, reporting and analytics, and IT training and adoption. We recently moved our data platform from Azure Synapse to Snowflake, and we're building toward conversational analytics — the idea that anyone in the organization should be able to ask a question and get a real answer. We're calling it Snowflake Intelligence, and it's the most exciting thing I've worked on.

Before Vail Health, I spent five years at Microsoft in sales operations, where I learned CRM, sales workflows, and how to build tools that actually get used by the people they're built for. That experience shaped how I think about the gap between systems and the people who depend on them.

Lately my work has drifted — intentionally — toward AI. Agentic AI, AI strategy, and what it means to actually integrate this technology into the way a healthcare organization operates. I built our HR chatbot. I track what's happening in the space daily. I think a lot about where this is going. I'm a data person at heart, but the more I work with AI, the more I think they're the same thing.