CINCINNATI – Aug. 31, 2026 – CBTS, a leading North American technology services company, today named Mark Giles Chief Technology Officer as the company brings AI, product management, and emerging technology priorities under a unified technology strategy designed to move proven capabilities into client environments to help drive business outcomes.
Giles brings 10 years of experience across CBTS sales, delivery, operations and technology leadership, building on a foundation in large-scale systems management from his years as a Data Systems Chief in the U.S. Marine Corps. He helped build the company’s automation backbone and launch its network-as-a-service and SD-WAN offerings before becoming Vice President of AI, where he led enterprise AI adoption. As CTO, Giles will set company-wide technology priorities, guide the development of client offerings, and continue to oversee AI adoption and product management.
“Our clients are looking for more than access to new AI capabilities; they need a partner who understands where those capabilities will make a meaningful difference,” said Kristin Russell, CEO of CBTS. “Mark has spent 10 years learning how CBTS operates from the ground up. He understands where AI needs to show up for our clients, not simply where it fits on a roadmap, making him the right leader to turn our strategy into practical value for CBTS and for our customers.”
As AI becomes more central to business operations, CBTS is bringing technology decisions previously distributed across teams into a more unified structure. Giles will connect the teams evaluating emerging technologies with those developing and delivering client services, giving clients a more direct role in determining which capabilities CBTS prioritizes.
The approach builds upon how CBTS already evaluates emerging technologies internally before applying those lessons to client environments. Bringing evaluation, product strategy, and solution architecture under the same technology leader will reduce handoffs and create a clearer path from experimentation to execution.
Giles has already demonstrated the value of this approach through the CBTS deployment of Anthropic Claude Enterprise. Under his leadership, CBTS scaled the rollout from an initial 250 users in March 2026 to all 2,300 employees company-wide within four months, governing AI access, spend, and every agent action through a single control plane. The program paid back its full investment in under three months, and the deployment has already contributed roughly $2 million in closed-won revenue, with zero major security incidents attributable to AI and incident containment running twice as fast with an agentic Security Operations Center.
“Technology strategy should be measured by how effectively we move the right capabilities from experimentation to execution,” said Giles. “My experience across CBTS has shown me that emerging technology creates value when it improves the environments our clients manage every day. As I take on this new role, I'm looking forward to building on that model across our broader strategy. My focus will be creating a clear, practical path to value, one that helps our clients see real results from the technology we invest in together."
Giles built his decade of experience out of the company's Cincinnati headquarters, where CBTS continues to centralize its AI strategy alongside its Managed Services roots.