Chandra Brubaker

Chandra founded Brainchild Technologies in 2016. She has spent more than 20 years in technology leadership, which is the difference between advising on a decision and having lived with one. When the firm makes a recommendation, she is the one who signs her name to it, and the one who comes back at the quarterly review to say whether it worked.

Before founding the firm she was Managing Director of IT at the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, where she was the organization's senior-most technology executive. Before that, Vice President of Media and Business Technology at WABE, Director of Information Technology at Atlanta Life Financial Group, and technology leadership roles in higher education including Morehouse College. Philanthropy, public media, higher education, financial services and nonprofits, which is why the constraints in those sectors are familiar rather than theoretical.

She has run technology where failure is immediate and public: the transition from SDI to IP routing and the move to digital radio in public media, and the buildout of trading desks and platforms in financial services. She has led CRM data conversions, migrations from on-premise servers to cloud and virtual infrastructure, and Microsoft Copilot deployments. Those projects taught the principle that still guides her work. Implementing the technology is usually the easier part. The harder work is preparing the organization, its people, its data and its leadership to use it.

She has also built and led technology teams, with a particular focus on developing the people on them. Chandra believes leadership should leave people more capable than when you found them. Members of her teams have gone on to expanded roles and leadership of their own. That shapes how she runs the firm and how it works with clients.

She holds an Associate of Science in Business from Georgia State University and a Technology Strategy certificate from MIT Sloan Executive Education. She is certified in IBM AI Strategy and Implementation, holds the Google Generative AI Leader certification, and is a Certified Project Manager. In 2025 she was named TAG Data Science and AI Innovator of the Year for the Public Sector, Government and Nonprofit category. She speaks on technology and AI governance, including a session for chief executives and boards at the 2025 Philanthropy Southeast Annual Conference.