Carol Tomé

Carol Tomé (born 1957 in Jackson, Wyoming) spent 24 years at The Home Depot — most as its long-serving CFO — before becoming CEO of UPS in June 2020, the first outsider and first woman to run the century-old delivery company. She took over days into the pandemic shipping boom and has since managed its painful unwind with a “better not bigger” strategy in which AI does ever more of the work.

AI runs the network

Under Tomé, machine learning moved from pilot to plumbing. UPS’s pricing organization replaced what she describes as “tribal knowledge and past experience” with generative-AI deal scoring — “our win rate is higher and our discounting is lower than it was,” she said in 2025 — a shift that let sales teams draft proposals without pricing analysts, many of whose jobs were then eliminated. On her Q3 2025 earnings call she credited agentic AI with absorbing new tariff-driven customs complexity, and the company’s network overhaul shifts volume from labor-intensive buildings into automated hubs where, as she puts it, “someone’s going to have to oversee the robots.”

The human cost is not hypothetical: UPS announced roughly 20,000 operational job cuts in 2025 alongside dozens of facility closures, with automation and machine learning explicitly part of the math. Tomé pairs the cuts with global upskilling programs meant to move remaining employees toward data- and AI-literate roles — a bargain organized labor views warily.