She majored in English Literature and Psychology, then spent two decades teaching the world's biggest companies how to ship. Now she runs MERGE.
Corner office, koozie within reach.
On January 9, 2025, MERGE handed the corner office to a woman who keeps drink koozies on her desk and patents in her pocket. The 870-person firm sits on the seam where consumer marketing rubs up against healthcare, the place most agencies find too technical and most technologists find too soft. Stephanie Trunzo has spent her whole career on exactly that seam, so the appointment read less like a gamble and more like a homecoming.
MERGE is a hybrid: part creative shop, part technology builder, headquartered at 220 East Randolph in Chicago with a Series C balance sheet and roughly $294M in annual revenue. It works with pizza brands and pharma launches, retail chains and health insurers. Trunzo joined the board in 2024. A year later she was steering the whole thing, which tells you the board liked what it saw up close.
Her thesis is unfashionably plain. Marketing, she argues, should not push. It should clarify. "Good marketing isn't telling people what to do or manipulating them into an action," she says. "It is helping people make more informed decisions." In an industry that often confuses persuasion with coercion, that is close to a manifesto.
She arrived at MERGE with a resume that reads like a dare: Oracle, IBM, a startup she doubled four years in a row. But the through-line is not the logos. It is a stubborn belief that complex things, healthcare especially, can be made accessible without being dumbed down.
At Oracle she was Senior Vice President and General Manager, and her job was not incremental. She launched Oracle Health, the company's bet on becoming a force in clinical software, and she sat at the center of the Cerner acquisition that gave the bet its spine. Folding an electronic-health-records giant into a database company is the kind of integration that ends careers. She ran toward it.
Rewind one stop and you find the IBM Garage, a global network of co-creation hubs designed to fuse enterprise rigor with startup tempo. Trunzo scaled it across 16 studios on multiple continents, turning a cute idea about working differently into infrastructure. The Garage was where Fortune 500 teams went to stop talking about agile and actually do it.
She is wary of the part of tech culture that falls in love with its own toys. "People get excited about new technologies," she says, "and so often it's like a solution looking for a problem." It is a sharp thing for a 20-patent AI pioneer to say, and it is exactly why people trust her with the budget.
Before the giants, there was PointSource. As COO and Chief Digital Officer she doubled revenue year over year for four straight years and stacked up three INC 5000 rankings. In 2017 the company was acquired by Globant, the publicly traded engineering firm, the "successful public acquisition" that her later bios refer to with such understatement.
PointSource is where she built the co-creation methodology she would later carry into IBM and beyond. It is also where she learned that growth is a verb you have to repeat, not a finish line you cross once.
She became a certified yoga instructor during the pandemic and teaches Rocket Yoga (YTT 200). She keeps a public yoga library running on her personal site. The CEO who tells you to breathe means it literally.
She collects drink koozies and shares them with her team, and likes to talk pets and hobbies during the workday. Small rituals, deliberately human, from someone who built a philosophy on not performing leadership.
As a teenager she subscribed to Psychology Today, fascinated by what motivates people. Two decades of digital transformation later, the question is the same. The audience just got bigger.
She once revealed a baby-related search mid-presentation on a shared screen. Instead of dying of embarrassment, she let it become a bonding moment. Proof of concept for her whole leadership style.
A recognized AI pioneer with 20-plus patents, she has been featured across the business and tech press and sits on the Lake Nona Impact Forum Advisory Board.
A vocal advocate for a more inclusive tech landscape, she mentors rising women leaders and supports community and nonprofit organizations.
"Be a real person, not the persona of a leader."
"People get excited about new technologies, and so often it's like a solution looking for a problem."
"Good marketing isn't telling people what to do or manipulating them into an action, it is helping people make more informed decisions."
"Fortune favors the prepared mind."
"Some people are only compatible with an expired version of you."
"You can identify milestones where you can learn and apply that learning to keep evolving."
She talks the way she leads: plainly, with a low tolerance for buzzwords. A good place to start is her IBM Think 2019 appearance, where she explains why cultural change, not new software, is the real product of a digital transformation.
Profile compiled from public sources. Facts current as of June 2026.