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The Woman Rebuilding Certification from the Ground Up, with AI, Strategy & Soul | Rebecca Sutter
Description
What happens when a Navy-trained coder, business strategist, and psychotherapist walks into ASE?
You get Rebecca Sutter, a CTO who’s rewriting the rules of certification. In this episode, she reveals how she’s transforming ASE’s decades-old systems into a cloud-native, data-first powerhouse—while mentoring the next wave of women leaders and reimagining testing with AI.
What does it take to modernize a nonprofit in a high-stakes, slow-to-change industry like automotive certification?
In this episode of The Innovator’s Playbook, Rebecca Sutter, CTO of the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE), walks us through how she’s leading a full-stack transformation: embracing cloud-native systems, launching AI in QA and proctoring, and advocating for data-first, people-focused innovation. From deep tech to human insight, this conversation is packed with real-world strategies for building smarter, fairer, and future-proof organizations.
Key Takeaways
From Navy Labs to Nonprofit Leadership: Curiosity Compounded
“I didn’t plan my career, every move was an answer to a better question.”
Rebecca shares how early exposure to ARPANET and Unix during a Navy research internship sparked a lifelong love for tech and how going back to school for business (and later psychology) helped her become a better leader, mentor, and strategist.
Tech That Works Because It’s Built Around People
“Don’t automate for efficiency, automate to empower.”
Whether she’s building data lakes or vetting AI-driven QA tools, Rebecca puts humans at the center. She breaks down why team safety matters more than process, and how tech leaders can make failure part of the culture without sacrificing trust or accountability.
Reinventing Assessment: AI, Blockchain & What’s Next
“If we get this right, credentials won’t just be valid, they’ll be verifiable, transferable, and fair.”
From psychometric rigor to adaptive testing models, Rebecca outlines the future of credentialing, and how AI, blockchain, and continuous validation will change everything from hiring to lifelong learning.
Leadership Lessons from the Frontlines
“I don’t want loyalty, I want alignment and growth. Even if it means you outgrow the job.”
Rebecca’s approach to team building is refreshingly honest. She shares how she hires, why onboarding is strategic, and what it really means to grow people in the right direction, even if that means letting them go.
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