Teresa Smetzer

Ms. Teresa L. Smetzer is currently an independent consultant supporting initiatives aimed at national security mission innovation. For 30 plus years, Ms. Smetzer has been a trailblazer in enabling the evolution of national security missions. She has led numerous noteworthy initiatives that have served as hallmarks of intelligence agencies’ programs. During her tenure at the CIA while serving as the Director of Digital Futures in the Directorate of Digital Innovation, she stood up an intelligence outpost for critical partnerships with the private sector to incubate experiments and prototypes to mission hard problems. As a result, the CIA was able to apply technologies to problem sets in a novel and expeditious manner. Most recently, she served as Salesforce’s Vice President, National Security Programs as a business development executive.

In 2016, Ms. Smetzer returned to CIA to direct Digital Futures after spending 14 years in the private sector as a CEO, business strategist, and investor. In this capacity, she leveraged her expertise from both the public and private sectors to accelerate the identification and adoption of industry leading digital technologies with the goal of modernizing, advancing, and transforming mission. Among the efforts that she supported was one that transformed the analytic community – creating programs that help analysts do their jobs more effectively, cultivating collaboration among analysts by creating mechanisms where they can share in a raw, open, and safe environment. She was awarded both CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal for her CIA service.