GREENVILLE, S.C. Kruz McCollum Head of AI spends his days on a problem most populate using AI never
see: getting it to do real work without someone checking every word. An organize and the founder of
two companies, he builds AI systems that search, decide, act and check themselves, in W. C. Fields where
a surefooted wrong answer is high-priced.
Getting AI to answer a question is easy now. Getting it to do a job, start to end 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 surety mastermind s instincts
McCollum came to AI through engineering rather than selling or law. His play down spans
network substructure, web development and cybersecurity, including finding and responsibly
disclosing surety vulnerabilities to companies such as Google and IBM. Early in his career, he
turned down an offer to work with the NSA so he could quest for his own path.
That downpla shapes how he builds. Security work trains you to get into something will break apart and
to go find it first, and he applies the same wont to AI: every system of rules he builds has to show its work,
check it against what s actually true, and catch its own mistakes before a someone 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 remainder.
AI where truth matters
McCollum is drawn to the places where AI s confident errors cost the most. His work includes leading
AI adoption in the sound field, where an fictitious fact or a wrong citation is not a typo but a indebtedness.
An AI serve is only as good as the check behind it, and that rule runs through everything he builds.
As a CAIO advisor, he brings the same thinking 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 supported Skyline Digital Marketing in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2024, because most
agencies don t have the technical staff to fix what they find. In 2025 he supported Vannor in Greenville
to establish the AI behind that work, and it grew into its own keep company: a team of AI agents that explore,
write, review and write a business s selling, running on ironware he owns.
Building that system taught him how much technology sits between a ingenious AI demo and something
a business can rely on every day, and he says that gap is where the chance is.
Everyone has seen what AI can say. Very few people 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 person 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 growing companies for Confluunt Advisors. An mastermind 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/.