Rusty Pickens

Rusty D. Pickens is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and the Founder of the Open Sovereignty Lab and 580 Strategies, a Native-Owned Salesforce consulting firm. He established the first Salesforce Center of Excellence at the White House Office of Administration and served as a public diplomacy technology lead at the U.S. Department of State. As a consultant, he has led enterprise cloud deployments for the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Native American Programs. Through the Open Sovereignty Lab, Rusty develops operational frameworks and assessment tools to help tribal nations protect their digital estate while safely adopting cloud and AI technologies. He has spoken on Indigenous data sovereignty at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City.