D. Brian Letort, Ph.D.

Brian Letort, Ph.D., is Global Head of Data and AI at Digital Realty. He built the corporate data and AI function from a 2023 one-person launch to a 120+ person accountable organization with a $30M+ owned budget, reporting to the EVP. Named inventor on two granted U.S. patents (2025).

D. Brian Letort, Ph.D., is Global Head of Data and AI at Digital Realty, a global data-center REIT spanning 330+ facilities. He built Data Office & AI from a one-person launch announced in November 2023 into a 120+ person accountable organization with a $30M+ owned annual budget, reporting to the EVP since August 2025. Direct leadership includes 3 Senior Directors, 2 Directors, and 2 senior ICs.

He owns the DigitalONE data workstream, stood up MDM across Inventory, Product, Customer Account, Operational Account, Legal/Contracts, and Operations, and leads the warehouse and pipeline used for quarterly earnings and investor supplemental reporting. Production AI since fall 2023 includes 20+ capabilities used by 4,500+ monthly active employees.

His Northrop Grumman career ran from 2001–2022. He joined Ingalls Shipbuilding in May 2001 as Senior Software Engineer, Lead, then moved through Enterprise Systems Architect and Enterprise Systems Engineer into Chief Application Architect (2013–2015), Chief Data Scientist (2015–2019), and Chief Enterprise Architect (2019–2022).

At Northrop Grumman, he set architecture direction for 600+ software engineers, built a dozen-person corporate data science team while providing method leadership to hundreds of sector data scientists, and led 22 chief architects as direct reports. He aligned architecture and strategy to an approximately $1.6B annual IT operating plan and served as chief information architect on the public $13.3B GBSD/Sentinel EMD award.

He is named inventor on U.S. Patents 12,452,217 and 12,489,818, author of 17 Pluralsight courses, and adjunct faculty since 2010. Education: Ph.D., Information Technology, Capella University, 2012; M.S., Information Technology, Capella University, 2009; B.S., Computer Science, Mississippi College, 2001. He is a 2022 Distinguished Alumnus of Mississippi College.