Gus Carlson -The Road to Autonomy

Gus Carlson

Chief operating officer

Gus Carlson has been creating, building and protecting value for companies for more than four decades. He is a specialist in helping leadership teams turn vision into reality, strategy into results, and value propositions into brand trust. Gus is most often called on to help companies in transition, working with leaders to help them understand shifts in their marketplaces, sharpen their competitive IQs, identify and execute on opportunities for growth, align their internal structures with business objectives and position their brands for success.  

Gus has senior-level experience across a broad range of sectors — autonomous transportation, media and information services, financial services, retailing, aeronautics and defense, health care and agriculture. As the former global chief marketing and communications officer for Thomson Reuters, he oversaw Thomson’s $17 billion acquisition of Reuters PLC in 2008 and the creation of the Thomson Reuters brand, consistently ranked one of the most valuable in the world. He also oversaw all communications around the company’s sale of its Financial & Risk business to Blackstone for $17 billion in 2018.  

Gus also held senior positions at Accenture, Standard and Poor’s, Barnes & Noble, PaineWebber and Hill and Knowlton. He has advised Honeywell, Chubb, Weill Cornell Medical College at New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Ever.Ag, In the autonomy space, he advised the leadership teams at several autonomous trucking startups on strategy, brand and positioning.

Gus is also an award-winning national business journalist. He is a former business editor at The New York Times and a business editor a columnist for The Miami Herald, where he was a member of the editorial team awarded the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for coverage of Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath in 1992. He writes a regular column for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. An author and director of a number of not-for-profit organizations, Gus lectures regularly to college students about media, communications and corporate reputation issues.