Toni Townes-Whitley

Toni Townes-Whitley’s hiring as CEO of SAIC last year saved the Fortune 500 from a sorry state: It had featured only one Black female CEO, TIAA’s Thasunda Brown Duckett. Townes-Whitley became the second Black woman to currently lead a Fortune 500 company and just the fourth permanent Black female Fortune 500 CEO ever in what was also a rare woman-to-woman CEO handoff at SAIC, a tech firm specializing in defense. She arrived from Microsoft, where she oversaw U.S. regulated industries like education, financial services, and government. That Microsoft business unit earned $16 billion in revenue; SAIC is smaller, with $7.4 billion in its most recent fiscal year. But from its headquarters in Reston, Va., SAIC works for an even more security-conscious client base: the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, space and intelligence, and civilian, a category that includes health agency and state government customers. SAIC’s services range from cybersecurity and cloud migration to drone detection and digital infrastructure for sending space assets into orbit. After starting her job, Townes-Whitley quickly executed a company reorganization around those main business units and upped SAIC’s tech cred by transferring its stock ticker from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq, where she serves on the board. Townes-Whitley also debuted a new AI tool designed for internal use by SAIC’s 24,000 employees.