GREENVILLE, S.C. Kruz McCollum spends his days on a trouble most people using AI never
see: getting it to do real work without someone checking every word. An direct and the flop of
two companies, he builds AI systems that search, resolve, act and check themselves, in W. C. Fields where
a confident wrong serve is costly.
Getting AI to answer a wonder is easy now. Getting it to do a job, start to wind up, 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 engineer s instincts
McCollum came to AI through technology rather than selling or law. His play down spans
network infrastructure, web and cybersecurity, including finding and responsibly
disclosing security vulnerabilities to companies such as Google and IBM. Early in his career, he
turned down an volunteer to work with the NSA so he could quest after his own path.
That play down shapes how he builds. Security work trains you to wear something will wear off and
to go find it first, and he applies the same wont to AI: every system he builds has to show its work,
check it against what s actually true, and its own mistakes before a individual 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 drawn to the places where AI s surefooted errors cost the most. His work includes leading
AI adoption in the legal arena, where an invented fact or a wrongfulness is not a typo but a indebtedness.
An AI serve is only as good as the behind it, and that rule runs through everything he builds.
As a CAIO adviser, he brings the same thinking to the companies he works with, portion them find
where AI actually pays off and put it to work alongside 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 staff to fix what they find. In 2025 he founded Vannor in Greenville
to establish the AI behind that work, and it grew into its own accompany: a team of AI agents that search,
write, reexamine and write a stage business s selling, running on hardware he owns.
Building that system taught him how much engineering sits between a ingenious AI demo and something
a stage business can rely on every day, and he says that gap is where the chance is.
Everyone has seen what AI can say. Very few populate have seen what it can do when it s built
properly, McCollum said. That s the part I can t stop working 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 founder is Head of AI at Armada Law, founder and CEO of Vannor and Skyline Digital
Marketing, and a CAIO consultant to development companies for Confluunt Advisors. An orchestrate by
background, he builds AI systems that do real work for merchandising 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/.