SAICI Launches The Vanguard 7, Naming Inaugural Members Set to Shape the Future of AI-Native Competitive Intelligence

The Vanguard 7 Inaugural Members, Jem Cuffee and Rose Beverly

SAICI names Jem Cuffee and Rose Beverly as the first members of The Vanguard 7, a council shaping the future of AI-native competitive intelligence.

WASHINGTON, DC, UNITED STATES, July 22, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Society for AI in Competitive Intelligence (SAICI), a microsociety of the American Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AIAI), today announced the formation of The Vanguard 7, a hand-selected council of practitioners, researchers, and operators charged with helping shape the future of the AI-native competitive intelligence (CI) profession and the future of SAICI. The first two inaugural members of The Vanguard 7 are Jem Cuffee and Rose Beverly.

The Vanguard 7 is being established as SAICI's standing advisory body for the questions now defining the field: how AI is changing the way competitive intelligence is produced, how practitioners should be trained and credentialed for an AI-native era, and how the profession should evolve as agentic systems, generative tools, and AI-augmented workflows become the operating reality of modern CI. Members are selected for their record of working at the leading edge — not as commentators on the future of the discipline, but as the people actively building it.

"The CI profession is being rebuilt around AI in real time, and the questions in front of it are too consequential to answer in a vacuum," said Jay Nakagawa, Co-Executive Director of SAICI. "The Vanguard 7 exists because SAICI needed a standing group of operators we could turn to, people already doing this work at high altitude across very different domains. Jem and Rose bring exactly that. They don't theorize about AI in CI. They've been inside it."

Inaugural Members of The Vanguard 7

Jem Cuffee is a founding member of SAICI and Senior Principal Engineer at Dell Technologies, where he works across AI/ML, cloud, and infrastructure — partnering with product, marketing, and sales to shape competitive strategy. Earlier roles at JPMorgan Chase spanning disruptive technology, software development, and economics gave him a foundation he has since extended into applied AI, machine learning, and technical research. For SAICI, Cuffee anchors the engineering perspective the AI-native CI profession will be built on, a practitioner who consistently bridges technical depth with practical execution.

Rose Beverly is a Senior Competitive Intelligence Analyst at CrowdStrike, where her work focuses on AI for cybersecurity, competitive strategy, and the emerging technologies reshaping how security markets are defined and contested. A UC Berkeley graduate in anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, she has spent nearly a decade across user experience research, innovation, and strategy at PayPal, MasterClass, and Silicon Valley Bank — work that produced M.A.S.T.E.R., a cross-functional AI adoption framework now in use across more than 30 organizations. Beverly brings to The Vanguard 7 the human dimension that makes AI-native CI legible: how intelligence gets interpreted, acted on, and embedded inside organizations where people still make the final call.

Together, the two inaugural members represent two competencies SAICI sees as foundational to the AI-native CI professional: engineering depth and human-AI fluency. Five additional members of The Vanguard 7 will be named in the coming months as SAICI completes the founding cohort.

"The CI profession can't be built by people standing outside of it, and no single discipline can do it alone," said Nan Bulger, Co-Executive Director of SAICI. "The Vanguard 7 is intentionally composed to reflect that. Jem and Rose each bring a different center of gravity, engineering and applied AI, and that's the kind of input SAICI needs as we set standards, shape professional development, and define what credible AI-native CI practice looks like."

Professionals interested in learning more about The Vanguard 7, SAICI, or the CGENAI^® in Competitive Intelligence certification are invited to visit saici.ai.

About SAICI

The Society for Artificial Intelligence in Competitive Intelligence (SAICI) is a professional society dedicated to advancing the future of competitive intelligence through standards, certification, professional development, and community. SAICI serves professionals and organizations working to build stronger intelligence capability in an environment shaped by artificial intelligence and rising strategic demands. Through its certification and leadership initiatives, SAICI is helping define the professional standard for modern competitive intelligence.

Marya Naqvi
American Institute of Artificial Intelligence
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