Emmy Smith

Emmy Smith is Senior Director of AI Strategy & Architecture at Candela Medical, where she leads the organization in leveraging data to accelerate innovation and growth. With 15+ years building and scaling global analytics organizations, Emmy has delivered over $1.5 billion in business value across technology, telecommunications, and financial services.

During her eight-year tenure at AWS, Emmy led analytics transformation for the global Partner Organization, expanding from supporting 350 to 4000+ stakeholders while growing her team from 13 to 90 professionals. She launched AI-powered solutions including the Partner Matching Engine using LLM and NLP technology that generated $650M ARR, productionalized ML models that automated 6000+ hours of work worth $1.1B in total contract value, and developed the RADAR framework for ML-based anomaly detection that became so successful AWS Glue is evaluating it as a product feature.

arlier in her career, Emmy led analytics teams at T-Mobile, building data infrastructure for 20,000+ monthly refund requests and serving as lead of the Analytical Community of Practice supporting 200+ analysts. She also held leadership roles at Bank of America and PNC.

Emmy served as Industry Liaison for INFORMS Women in OR/MS, as well as President of the international employee-led group Women at Bar Raisers at Amazon. She holds an MBA from Western Governors University and an MS in Statistics from the University of South Carolina. Her StrengthsQuest profile—Analytical, Learner, Responsibility, Deliberative, Intellection, and Relator—defines her approach to building teams and lasting analytics value.