About
William Willis is the Executive Director of AI Ready RVA, a 501(c)(3) building the AI literacy and workforce infrastructure Greater Richmond needs to compete in an AI-driven economy. He helped found the organization, served as board chair, and in March 2026 became its first Executive Director and first full-time employee. He came to this work from inside enterprise AI. At Capital One's Center for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, he led program management for AI and machine learning adoption across the enterprise, owning onboarding, deployment, and lifecycle management. Before that, twenty years in operations, quality control, and supply chain at Qimonda, CarMax, and Dominion Payroll taught him how systems actually scale, and how often they do not. Under his leadership, AI Ready RVA runs peer-led industry cohorts in healthcare, finance, law, cybersecurity, and manufacturing, convenes the region through Power of Possibility, and is developing an AI Innovation, Education, and Community Center in Richmond. A military brat raised across Air Force assignments in the United States and abroad, he has lived in Richmond for 29 years. He holds a Mini-MBA from the University of Richmond's Robins School of Business and a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.