GREENVILLE, S.C. Kruz McCollum agentic AI spends his days on a problem most people using AI never
see: getting it to do real work without someone checking every word. An mastermind and the flop of
two companies, he builds AI systems that research, adjudicate, act and check themselves, in William Claude Dukenfield where
a surefooted wrongfulness serve is pricy.
Getting AI to serve a question is easy now. Getting it to do a job, take up to finish, and know when it
got something wrong, that s the hard part, McCollum said. It s also the most exciting engineering
problem I ve ever worked on.
A security organise s instincts
McCollum came to AI through engineering rather than selling or law. His play down spans
network infrastructure, web development and cybersecurity, including determination and responsibly
disclosing security vulnerabilities to companies such as Google and IBM. Early in his , he
turned down an offer to work with the NSA so he could pursue his own path.
That background shapes how he builds. Security work trains you to don something will break off and
to go find it first, and he applies the same habit 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 difference.
AI where truth matters
McCollum is closed to the places where AI s sure-footed errors cost the most. His work includes leading
AI adoption in the sound field, where an unreal fact or a wrongfulness citation is not a typo but a indebtedness.
An AI do is only as good as the check behind it, and that rule runs through everything he builds.
As a CAIO consultant, he brings the same thinking to the companies he workings with, portion them find
where AI actually pays off and put it to work aboard the systems they already run, rather than
bolting on tools nobody uses.
Building companies on it
McCollum based Skyline Digital Marketing in Anderson, South Carolina, in 2024, because most
agencies don t have the technical foul stave to fix what they find. In 2025 he supported Vannor in Greenville
to build the AI behind that work, and it grew into its own company: a team of AI agents that explore,
write, reexamine and write a business s selling, running on hardware he owns.
Building that system taught him how much engineering sits between a adroit AI demo and something
a stage business can rely on every day, and he says that gap is where the opportunity 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 workings on.
Always learning
McCollum holds 29 professional 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 adviser to development companies for Confluunt Advisors. An direct by
background, he builds AI systems that do real work for selling and stage 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/.
