Hari Bala, Chief Technology Officer, HIS at Solventum, Recognized with the IT Innovator of the Year Award!

The Millennium Alliance is proud to announce that Hari Bala, Chief Technology Officer, HIS at Solventum (former 3M Healthcare), received the IT Innovator of the Year Award at our Digital Enterprise CIO Transformation Assembly, held June 23–24 at The Omni Barton Creek in Austin.

See the full list of winners and learn how you could be our next nominee—visit our Awards Page!

About Hari Bala

Hari Bala is an AI and technology executive with more than 25 years of experience leading Product, Engineering, and Advanced Sciences (GenAI and Agentic AI) across Microsoft, Oracle, GE, and Solventum. He has built and led global organizations of more than 2,000 people and delivered multi-billion-dollar business impact through high-performing AI, cloud, and software solutions.

Recognized in Microsoft’s Top 1 Percent and Oracle’s Outstanding Talent program, Hari has founded and scaled Big Data & AI/ML, Health AI/Analytics, and cloud services teams from the ground up. He also holds 20 patents in AI and machine learning and is passionate about developing leaders, having mentored numerous professionals into senior and C-suite roles.

His experience spans complex, distributed systems across healthcare, cloud, security, retail, and transportation. He has overseen full product lifecycles and led major SaaS and PaaS portfolios, including Azure, Windows Security/Fundamentals, Cosmos, Bing, Excel, and OCI AI.

Hari has delivered GenAI automation achieving more than 90% cost savings in HealthAI operations while driving engineering excellence through improved cycle time, predictability, uptime, and product quality. He believes technology creates its greatest impact when it is built with empathy, clarity, and disciplined engineering.