Stephanie Sylvestre

Stephanie Sylvestre is the co founder and CEO of Avatar Buddy, an AI Solutions company built on a radical premise: in the age of algorithms, trust is the real technology. For more than 30 years, Stephanie has implemented high stakes systems in the least forgiving environments—public agencies, quick service resturants, and social impact organizations where a single misstep can cost dollars, and political capital. As CIO of The Children’s Trust in Miami, she led one of the few organizations globally that was fully cloud ready when COVID hit, transitioning to remote operations that supported thousands of providers without losing a day of service. At Avatar Buddy, she now designs AI Solutions for organizations that can’t afford hallucinations or hype. Her team blends behavioral science, Large Language Models, and a customer’s own Data Vault—a secure knowledge layer that keeps institutional wisdom and IP under the client’s control. From law enforcement pilots and education systems to emerging countries, Avatar Buddy’s Function Specific AI Agents are deployed only when Stephanie can put verifiable guardrails around them. Born in Belize and forged in rooms where she had to earn every inch of credibility, Stephanie has spent her career turning skepticism into a design constraint, not a blocker. On this panel, she’ll unpack how to win when the default answer is “no,” how to make AI decisions auditable and explainable, and why the hardest customers in the world are the ones that make your company unbeatable.