Intel CLO April Miller Boise’s Skills Help Shape AI Strategy

April Miller Boise had been in her new job at Intel for barely six months when Open AI released ChatGPT three years ago.

“Certainly people have been using artificial intelligence. It was underlying lots of different applications and functions,” Miller Boise, the executive vice president and chief legal officer of the company, said. But watching a generative AI tool and what it was capable of doing meant that businesses had to think what it meant for them, she said. “Fundamentally, it has changed computing, and the way probably all of us do and will do our work.”

Miller Boise arrived as Intel was making strategic changes in battling chip makers like AMD and Nvidia for market share. By the end of 2024, CEO Pat Gelsinger had been forced out, eventually replaced by former board member Lip-Bu Tan.

Now, she is bringing her skills in a range of industries including manufacturing to help Intel’s craft its AI strategy while working with the company’s leaders to make sure that the legal team is enabling innovation.

“AI is critically important, and we have to have an AI strategy that wins. And we’re very much focused on that AI roadmap,” Miller Boise said.

At Intel, she leads a team of about 400. “We think of our work in kind of four areas, and that is to drive growth, to help the company manage and mitigate risk, to remove roadblocks, and to make sure we’re delivering the best in class function and the best in class team,” she said.

Miller Boise had gotten to know Tan when he was part of the Intel board before he became CEO. “He’s been in a semiconductor and in the technology ecosystem for a really long time, and he’s very focused on making sure we get back to technology leadership,” she said about Tan.

A Topsy Turvy World

In October, Intel announced its first profit after six consecutive quarters of losses. It was the latest in a flurry of major corporate headlines. The US government announced it was taking a 10% stake in Intel in August while SoftBank moved to invest $2 billion in the company around the same time. In September, chipmaker Nvidia said it was investing $5 billion in Intel. The company plans to end 2025 with 20% less employees than at the end of the June quarter.

The deals have kept Miller Boise busy. “We’re very, very engaged in those transactions at the highest level, with the board, with the CEO, with our CFO, with our leadership team,” she said.

“She’s got a pretty wide portfolio now at Intel, and that’s a complicated situation, and she seems to be doing really well at it,” said John Surma, a former CEO and chairman of US Steel who is on the board of directors of Trane Technologies, a global HVAC company, along with Miller Boise.

Surma noted that Intel had a different CEO with a different plan when Miller Boise arrived at the company. And now she has the same role but with more responsibility, he said. “It means that she was really critical to the process and helped it along and did something really spectacular for the company to get to where they are today,” he said.

At Trane, Miller Boise was confident and self-assured. “It was as if she’d been on the board for a while. She just didn’t miss a beat and became an immediate contributor in the board meetings,” said Gary Forsee, a former chairman and CEO of Sprint Nextel who was on the Trane board with her.

Miller Boise’s roots with midwestern manufacturing companies has helped as Intel sits at the crossroads of technology and advanced manufacturing. “We’re a tech company, but we’re a manufacturing company. We make things,” she said.

Her background was one reason Intel got interested in her, she said.

“I had done a lot of work with industrial companies, multinational manufacturing companies that had very significant advanced manufacturing capabilities,” she said.

Back in the Midwest

Miller Boise now lives in Silicon Valley in California, not far from Intel’s Santa Clara headquarters. But she is a midwesterner at heart, having worked at companies like Eaton, Meritor and, law firm, Thompson Hine LLP, in Cleveland, Ohio.

She and her husband, David Willbrand, the chief legal officer at real estate company, Pacaso Inc., still maintain a home near Cleveland.

A product of Shaker Heights near Cleveland, and Southfield, a Detroit suburb, she obtained her undergraduate business degree from the University of Michigan. A visiting professor sparked her interest in law. “I didn’t really know a lot of lawyers growing up, and I didn’t have any lawyers in my family or community members that I was close to,” she said.

Miller Boise attended the University of Chicago Law School in the 1990s, where she had current US Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan as a professor. Boise learned civil procedure from Diane Wood, the third woman to be hired as a law professor at Chicago.

International focus

Almost a decade later, Miller Boise was invited to apply to be a German Marshall Fellow, which enables professionals in the U.S. to spend time in Europe.

“I went to Shaker Heights, which is a very academic focused school district, and I studied French early on, and always really wanted to travel abroad, but didn’t come from the kind of background where we had money to go and travel abroad,” Miller Boise said.

She later spent three months in Paris between her undergraduate and graduate degrees. And the fellowship was an opportunity to learn more about Europe.

Now, Miller Boise travels to Ireland several times a year for Trane board meetings and elsewhere in Europe and Asia for Intel.

“Lots of industries transform, and companies that are able to reimagine and transform with them thrive,” said Christy Pambianchi, the chief human resource officer at Caterpillar who previously worked at Intel and helped hire her. “She’ll be part of the team that’s going to help them figure that.”

Miller Boise credits the team around her for helping get through that transformation. “I like to say, ‘I run into burning buildings’, but you can only do that when you have a really strong team. That is, you’re all rowing the same way,” she said.