Sophia Van

The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement retailer, operating more than 2,300 stores across North America and serving both DIY consumers and professional contractors.

Sophia Van brings over two decades of AI leadership across Liberty Mutual, Mercer, and Disney to her role at The Home Depot. Rather than building isolated AI applications, she architects scalable platforms designed for reuse, enabling organizations to continuously spin up new use cases with speed and consistency. 

She has overseen 100-plus GenAI use cases across enterprise functions, designed robust LLM evaluation frameworks and AI guardrails, and was invited as a faculty contributor to Kellogg Executive Education, where she addressed C-suite leaders on AI-driven transformation.

"We're entering an agentic era of retail where AI doesn't just generate insights, it thinks, makes decisions, acts, and iterates. Hyper-personalization will become the norm, powered by agents working on our behalf. But this isn't about replacing humans; it's about elevating them. Humans will orchestrate these agents, bringing judgment, empathy, and values into every decision. Ironically, the deeper I work in AI, the more I appreciate what makes us human," Sophia told AIM Media House.