Speaker profile

Eui Chung

Co-founder and CTO of Polygrade. He spent nearly 30 years at Sears and Transformco, rising from software developer to Chief Technology Officer, and built Sears Home Services’ first applied AI engineering team before LLMs went mainstream.

SPEAKS ON

Applied AI · AI in production · Forward deployed engineering · Engineering leadership · Enterprise architecture · Legacy modernization · Change management

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Eui Chung, co-founder and CTO of Polygrade

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At a glance

NOW

Co-founder and CTO of Polygrade, AI-native claims management for the warranty industry

CAREER

Nearly 30 years at Sears, Transformco and their affiliates, from software developer to Chief Technology Officer

AT SCALE

Built a fintech and loyalty platform serving more than 80 million users

APPLIED AI

Built and led Sears Home Services’ first applied AI engineering team before LLMs went mainstream

PATENTS

Holds patents across multiple domains, including machine learning and speech-to-text technology

MOST RECENTLY

Led Sears Home Services’ AI-first transformation, with an AI co-pilot platform and multi-agent systems for technicians and routing teams

About Eui

Eui Chung is the co-founder and CTO of Polygrade, an AI-native claims management platform for the warranty industry. Polygrade came out of stealth in October 2026 with $6.3M raised.

He spent nearly 30 years at Sears, Transformco and their affiliates, rising from software developer to Chief Technology Officer. He built a fintech and loyalty platform serving more than 80 million users and led the launch of a co-branded credit card loyalty program in partnership with Citibank. He holds patents across multiple domains, including machine learning and speech-to-text technology.

He built and led Sears Home Services’ first applied AI engineering team before LLMs went mainstream, led the technical side of its mainframe migration, and most recently led its AI-first transformation, developing an AI co-pilot platform and integrating multi-agent systems to support technicians and routing teams.

What Eui talks about

Outputs vs. outcomes

Why large organizations reward visible motion long before anyone checks whether it moved a result, and the question he uses to keep a team honest about it.

Why AI pilots stall after launch

Pilots rarely fail before launch. They fail when production brings exceptions, organizational friction and system gaps the demo never had to handle.

Leadership is taught backwards

Most programs start with leading your own team, but working with peers and managing up decide whether that team’s work lands.

Forward deployed engineering

Why the forward deployed engineer model exists, and what changes when one engineer owns a deployment from kickoff through the outcome.

Applied AI, before and after LLMs

He built Sears Home Services’ first applied AI engineering team before LLMs went mainstream. What’s changed since: when one model is enough, when a workflow needs specialized agents, and where human review belongs.

Day zero architecture decisions

Architecture is a first decision, not a later one. Why calls made on day zero, like headed or headless integration, quietly set your future cost of change, and how to read the objective before the architecture hardens.

Modernizing a legacy enterprise

He led the technical side of Sears Home Services’ move off its mainframe. What it takes to modernize the systems a business runs on every day, and why the undocumented logic wrapped around a core system is harder to move than the code.

Making change stick in a large enterprise

The technical build is rarely the hardest part of a transformation. The hardest part is the politics, the legacy processes held together with manual workarounds, and the stakeholder who is quietly skeptical because the last transformation went nowhere.

Enterprise vs. startup DNA

After years in large enterprises, he led an Israeli startup in Herzliya from 25 people to more than 150. What it taught him about directness, real versus performative urgency, and trust that is earned by results, not title.