GREENVILLE, S.C. Kruz McCollum agentic AI spends his days on a problem most populate using AI never
see: getting it to do real work without someone checking every word. An organize and the flop of
two companies, he builds AI systems that research, adjudicate, act and themselves, in William Claude Dukenfield where
a sure-footed wrong answer is expensive.
Getting AI to answer a question is easy now. Getting it to do a job, start to end 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 engineering rather than selling or law. His play down spans
network infrastructure, web and cybersecurity, including determination 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 assume something will fall apart and
to go find it first, and he applies the same wont to AI: every system of rules he builds has to show its work,
check it against what s actually true, and its own mistakes before a mortal 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 accuracy matters
McCollum is drawn to the places where AI s capable errors cost the most. His work includes leading
AI adoption in the legal domain, where an fabricated fact or a wrong is not a typo but a financial obligation.
An AI do is only as good as the check behind it, and that rule runs through everything he builds.
As a CAIO consultant, he brings the same mentation to the companies he workings with, serving 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 founded 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 build the AI behind that work, and it grew into its own companion: a team of AI agents that search,
write, reexamine and publish a byplay s merchandising, track on ironware he owns.
Building that system of rules taught him how much technology sits between a clever AI demo and something
a stage business can rely on every day, and he says that gap is where the opportunity is.
Everyone has seen what AI can say. Very few people 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 is Head of AI at Armada Law, fall through 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 marketing and byplay. His work, press
coverage and certifications are at https://kruzmccollum.com/, and he is on LinkedIn at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kruz-mccollum/.