Chris Crist didn’t grow up imagining a career in technology. In fact, he didn’t believe a career in science, engineering, or IT was possible for someone with his background.
From an immigrant family, he had no examples of relatives who had gone to college or even built professional careers. Yet, his perseverance and determination led him to become CIO of a hospital system at just 25, before going on to lead technology across healthcare organizations and modernization efforts connected to the U.S. Department of Defense.
He now serves as the Chief Information Officer for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), serving 106.3 million passengers a year as the busiest airport in the world.
Since joining the airport, he has focused on shifting the technology culture to proactive execution by reorganizing technology workflows and the business processes behind new initiatives.
Through his work, Crist’s leadership has maintained a philosophy of honesty and a willingness to learn. He believes trust is built through candor about what you do and do not know, by hearing the voices of those most affected, and by actively seeking feedback that others avoid.
Walk us through your career path. How did you decide to pursue a career in technology, and how did you get to where you are now?
I didn’t think I would end up in technology mainly because I didn’t think it was possible for me.
My family came to this country hoping for something better. Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to anyone who had finished high school, gone to college, or built a professional career. We had three generations living in the same household because it was how we survived. I simply didn’t picture myself doing anything involving higher education or technical expertise.
Right out of high school, I joined the military without knowing much about it and entered the medical space because I wanted my work to have meaning.
I thought that if I could help people during their most difficult moments, I would be doing something important.
But during my time in the military, I met people from all over the world who were close to my age, going to college, building careers, and serving their country.
That exposure changed what I believed was possible for my own life, so I went to college and began pursuing a degree in technology.
Not long after, a commander recognized something in me and put me in charge of IT when I was just 19 years old.
At the time, I didn’t appreciate it, but looking back, I’m incredibly grateful.
That experience gave me enough confidence to pursue director and CIO roles after six years of active duty, even when people told me I was crazy to leave the military or aim that high. I stayed in the reserves, later commissioned as an officer, and became the CIO of a hospital system at 25.
From there, I served as CIO for several hospital systems and later led modernization work for a global Department of Defense organization connected to the U.S. Transportation Command. Today, I’m the CIO of the busiest airport in the world.
If you showed my 15-year-old self this future, I don’t think he could have comprehended it. I am deeply grateful to be here.
Can you tell us about some of the initiatives and major career accomplishments that you are proud of?
When I arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson, I found an IT department that was amazingly responsive. It was honestly the best I had ever seen.
At an airport this large, issues happen, but the team was exceptional at putting out fires. Where I saw opportunity was to preserve responsiveness while building far more proactive capability.
What I’m most proud of is the foundational adjustment that made everything possible.
We reorganized around operations, cybersecurity, data and artificial intelligence, and engineering and innovation. While operations still maintain the environment 24/7, other teams have the focus and space to improve processes and build on what comes next.
The workflow from idea to production was also completely rebuilt.
While the team was talented, the process had too many barriers, and delivery could take more than 300 days. Meanwhile, the project management team had no objective way to know which projects mattered most because most were labeled a priority.
To help, we brought the business into the prioritization process, established a clear order of work, and dramatically reduced shadow IT. Although it required a significant cultural change, as a result, average project delivery fell from more than 300 days to about 28 days. I’m incredibly proud of the team for embracing it.
If we pretend to have certainty that does not exist, we erode the trust we need to make change possible.”
Our most challenging work involved the resiliency of our network infrastructure.
The airport was experiencing recurring outages across concourses, be it Wi-Fi in one area, cameras in another, or cellular capability elsewhere, that required taking an entire concourse offline, which the organization had never done.
Every hour of disruption at an airport can represent millions of dollars, and shutting down a concourse affects far more than Wi-Fi. Access controls, exits, cameras, airlines, security agencies, and public safety systems are all connected to technology. We spent four months coordinating with internal teams, the airlines, the FAA, TSA, Customs and Border Protection, police, and other stakeholders.
Then, from midnight until roughly 2:30 a.m., we took the first concourse down and implemented the change.
It wasn’t perfect. We made mistakes and learned a great deal.
On the next concourse, we cut the time roughly in half, and we continued improving until we had completed every concourse in about a year and a half. The changes have already proven themselves, as so far in 2026 there has not been a single outage.
Of course, the technology was important, but the larger challenge was organizational trust because I couldn’t promise how long the first shutdown would take. I had to tell the stakeholders openly that I did not know whether it would take minutes, hours, or longer, and they appreciated the honesty.
If we pretend to have certainty that does not exist, we erode the trust we need to make change possible.
How is your role changing as more of the passenger journey becomes digital, and what emerging technology do you believe will have the greatest impact?
Technology is becoming embedded in every industry, and aviation makes that especially visible.
A passenger begins by booking a flight through technology. Then, on the day of travel, the first thing many people do is check an app for departure time, boarding status, gate information, and security checkpoint wait times.
When the passenger reaches the airport, technology has to support the parking systems, lighting, cellular service, Wi-Fi, thousands of cameras, biometrics, airline operations, and the systems that keep the facility safe and moving.
The journey is digital from beginning to end, which changes the CIO’s role to be a business leader as well as a technology operator.
The future of aviation and passenger experience does not exist without technology, which means CIOs must be part of the decisions that shape where the business is going.
One specific area that will transform many industries is computer vision.
At the airport, we implemented an AI layer in our environment of roughly 7,000 cameras to help authorized teams understand what is happening across the facility in real time and investigate an event far more quickly than a manual review of individual feeds.
If someone leaves a bag unattended, for example, security personnel can use known characteristics and location information to identify the right person and follow that individual’s path across cameras in seconds.
The immediate value is stronger situational awareness and safety, but long-term, the same family of technologies can help make the passenger journey more secure and seamless.
I believe we are moving toward an experience in which airports can securely recognize who you are, understand where you need to go, identify dangerous objects, and reduce friction between the entrance and the gate.
Because no one else had done this work when we began, it means failure and uncertainty are part of the process.
However, it also means we have the unique opportunity to help shape the future of aviation.
How do you decide which technology investments are worth pursuing and which are not right for the organization?
The most important point is that I do not decide, and IT does not decide alone. That was one of the biggest changes we made.
Technology decisions didn’t originally have enough business input, so we created a process that brought leaders from other business units into the same conversation to debate and rank the projects. Those discussions were sometimes heated, but they helped people understand one another’s needs and gave us a shared view of what mattered most.
IT’s role was to create an objective rubric and refine it with their feedback.
We evaluate proposed investments across four areas.
First, is the work mandated, tied to life safety, or driven by regulation? Second, does it affect business continuity? Third, will it generate revenue or reduce expenses? Fourth, how will it affect the customer experience?
Each project receives a weighted score so we can compare priorities more objectively and help remove emotion and politics from the decision as much as possible. It also builds trust because the business understands how the priorities were established and has real ownership of the outcome.
Can you share a time when you had to pivot on an IT initiative and what that experience taught you?
Earlier in my career, I joined a hospital organization that was struggling financially. We needed to reduce expenses and find new revenue.
At the time, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services offered major incentives for hospitals that achieved meaningful use of technology, particularly within the electronic medical record.
I saw an opportunity.
My team built what we believed was a strong system, provided training to physicians and nurses, and I told the board that we were on track to earn millions of dollars in incentives. Then the first report arrived, and only about 5% of our physicians were meeting the objectives.
I was devastated.
“If you want to change people’s work, you have to understand their environment and what matters to them.”
It was one of the clearest failures of my career because we had built and trained without truly understanding the people who had to change their daily work.
Our team went back to the drawing board, and for over a year we observed clinical workflows, listened to frustrations, made changes to the system, and slowly built trust.
One physician resisted the change longer than anyone else. I spent time with him in his clinic, and one day the system warned that a medication he was about to prescribe could interact negatively with something the patient was already taking. We confirmed the information with the patient, and he looked at me and said, ‘I understand.’
That was the moment the value became real for him.
Technology adoption begins with connection. If you want to change people’s work, you have to understand their environment and what matters to them.
What has your current role taught you about yourself as a leader?
For much of my career, I believed I had to know as much as, or more than, everyone who reported to me.
If a team member discussed a topic that I did not fully understand, I would give up an evening or a weekend to study until I felt I could match that expertise.
I thought leadership meant knowing everything about the function I was responsible for.
The complexity of Hartsfield-Jackson forced me to accept that I cannot know it all. If my role is to connect the organization to all our stakeholders around the world, I have to spend meaningful time building those relationships and helping everyone move in the same direction.
“A leader’s job is not to be the smartest person in every room. It’s to create the conditions in which talented people can do their best work.”
I still need to understand the technology, but I am not going to write every application or install every network connection.
I’ll become rusty at some hands-on skills, and that’s all right. That’s why we build teams. I rely on their expertise; they rely on my leadership, and together we can solve problems that are too large for any one person.
One of the people on my team, our technology leader for innovation and engineering, built an extraordinary solution overnight that received a standing ovation from a key stakeholder and became part of our patent work. I told him directly, ‘You know more than I do, and that is the way it should be.’
I am proud of that.
A leader’s job is not to be the smartest person in every room. It’s to create the conditions in which talented people can do their best work.
What advice would you give someone who aspires to become a CIO of a large, complex organization?
Become hungry for consistent feedback. Don’t let defensiveness or pride keep you from hearing what people are trying to tell you. Whether the feedback is solicited or unsolicited, listen to it and decide what you can learn.
I think of leadership as navigating a difficult landscape. If people trust you enough to be honest, they can tell you where the water is, where the terrain becomes dangerous, and where you might find shelter.
If you don’t create a culture in which people can give you feedback without fear, you are trying to navigate with far less information.
The military taught me the operational value of direct feedback.
During one deployment to Guam, our team built a hospital from the ground up. Everyone involved spanning doctors to HVAC technicians all helped set up tents and solve the problems in front of us. The work was hot, exhausting, and uncomfortable, but no one was above the mission. Constant feedback helped us identify needs and act quickly.
The civilian world required me to add a more humanistic perspective.
People reasonably care about how they are treated and perceived, so feedback must be delivered with respect. So, to be effective as a leader, you have to balance candor with empathy.
We cannot ignore the human response, but we also cannot allow concern about perception to obscure reality.
At the airport, our resiliency work became possible because someone many levels down in the organization was willing to tell me that a redundancy had never been tested and no one knew whether it would work. He expected me to be angry. Instead, I thanked him because he had given me the information we needed to address the risk.
That is the culture I want to foster. People telling the truth early, leaders receiving it without punishment, and teams treating uncomfortable information as an opportunity to improve.
The more honest information you have, the more effectively you can lead.
Above all, I remain grateful. I am thankful for the team around me, excited about the work ahead, and aware that I still have many years left in my career. What we’re building has the potential to be transformational, and I am genuinely excited to see where it leads.
How do you decompress from the challenges of being a technology leader? What do you like to do for fun?
That’s a difficult question because I am fortunate to love what I do.
Given where I came from, I never imagined I would hold a position like this. The gratitude I feel often outweighs the pressure, so I don’t experience the work only as something that drains me or that requires a separate escape.
My perspective did change during the COVID-19 pandemic when I was deployed to New York as a Medical Service Corps officer in March 2020. The city was an early epicenter, and I was responsible for distributing about 800 military personnel across 11 hospitals.
At the time, we knew that some of us might not come home, but healthcare professionals were confronting an overwhelming number of patients and a disease no one yet knew how to treat.
What we witnessed was extraordinarily difficult.
Until then, I had prioritized my career over everything. That experience really made the human element more important to me. I began placing greater value on friendships and family relationships, and each year I try to become more intentional about them.
If I have a way to recharge, it’s being with the people in my life and remembering what matters beyond the work.
Are there any books that you recommend, that you give to others, or that have shaped you as a leader?
Honestly, no. There isn’t one resource I would recommend as the answer.
The advice I return to came from my father after we met in my twenties, when he often told me to ‘just do things’.
What he really meant was to dive in. Learn it, experience it, fail at it, embarrass yourself, and be rejected.
It’s similar to Brené Brown’s framing of being in the arena. Whatever happens, you will learn something that you could not have learned from the sidelines.
The people doing difficult work will always have critics in the seats who believe they would have done it differently or better.
I am far more interested in learning from the people who have stepped into the arena themselves.
So my recommendation is to get involved before you feel completely ready.
Take on the uncomfortable assignment and try something that might not work. The experience may be difficult, but over time you will realize that you have gone places others have not, and you will be able to help them move forward too.
Who has had the greatest influence on your life and leadership?
My grandmother was my first mentor and the person who made me believe I might be capable of something more.
Growing up without my father, I often felt like one person among many. No one was telling me I was smart or saying that I would do great things, but she was the exception.
She came to this country under very difficult circumstances. Having never known her family and never receiving any formal education, her life was incredibly hard, but she worked relentlessly to make things happen for her six children. While she hoped one of them would go to college and build a different life here, that didn’t happen.
I became the first in our family to do it for generations.
A few years ago, I completed my doctorate at Vanderbilt University, and she attended the graduation. For me, just knowing she would be there was emotional because it fulfilled that hope from roughly 80 years earlier.
Her life also gives me perspective.
My work can be stressful. There are sleepless nights and thankless moments, but I cannot compare those challenges with what she endured while finding her way in this country. That is why gratitude is such a central part of how I see my life and leadership.
