About
A. H. "Trey" Harper, III, DBA
Dr. Trey Harper is a transformational technology executive with over 25 years of experience leading enterprise-scale digital, cloud, and AI modernization across the public and private sectors. He currently serves as a Cloud Consulting Leader at Google Cloud, where he architects AI-readiness strategies and stands up C-suite governance frameworks for multinational accounts. He previously held leadership roles at Amazon Web Services and CGI Federal, including running a 1,200-person multi-site delivery organization and overseeing a $325M+ federal portfolio.
His work sits at the intersection of three forces that most technology executives treat as separate: enterprise-scale platform delivery, AI adoption at the C-suite, and the academic study of how trust and legitimacy actually drive technology adoption. He holds a Doctorate in Business Administration from Drexel University, where his dissertation — chaired by Dr. David Gefen, one of the most-cited scholars in information systems — tested how perceived legitimacy, trust, and distrust shape advocacy for generative AI through a between-subjects experiment with 715 respondents. His peer-reviewed research has been presented at the Southeast Decision Sciences Institute, and his current work extends the framework into agentic AI — the systems that act rather than recommend, and that change the trust calculus in ways the field is only beginning to understand.
He pursued the DBA in his late forties because two decades of watching enterprise technology adoptions succeed and fail had surfaced questions about trust, legitimacy, and adoption that career experience could not answer on its own — questions that have only sharpened as the field has moved from generative to agentic systems.
Outside of work, Trey road races with the Sports Car Club of America and does track days with the Porsche Club of America in his modified Porsche Cayman GTS, prepped as a race car. He is an instructor candidate with PCA HPDE and volunteers as Emergency Vehicle Services for PCA Club Race and the Vintage Racer Group. Most of all, he treasures time with his wife and family. He lives in Northern Virginia.
A proud U.S. Air Force veteran, Trey actively mentors fellow veterans navigating career transitions into technology and consulting.
He writes bi-weekly in On the Seam: Working Drafts, a LinkedIn newsletter on Agentic AI adoption, trust, and the translation work between technical capability and accountable outcome. Subscribe on LinkedIn, connect on LinkedIn, or reach him at trey@treyharper.com.
Selected Publications
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Harper, A. H., III. (2025). A quantitative study of generative AI advocacy intention determinants [Doctoral dissertation, Drexel University]. https://doi.org/10.17918/00010876
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) represents a pivotal innovation in technology, transforming processes through advanced automation and content generation. This study investigates the dynamics of GenAI adoption, focusing on trust, distrust, and legitimacy as key constructs influencing advocacy intentions. The research initially proposed an experimental conceptual model that hypothesized trust and distrust as simultaneous mediators between legitimacy dimensions (cognitive, pragmatic, normative, and regulative) and advocacy intentions, moderated by risk contexts. However, empirical findings did not substantiate the proposed pathways, prompting a revision of the framework. Through a quantitative survey methodology, the study provides a re-evaluation of legitimacy's role and its impact on GenAI adoption behaviors across low-risk and high-risk application scenarios. By addressing these complexities, this research contributes to the scholarly discourse on GenAI advocacy, offering actionable insights for organizations aiming to integrate GenAI responsibly while navigating challenges in trust and legitimacy across diverse contexts.
- Ghashami, F., Harper, A. H., III, & Gefen, D. (2024). Legitimacy under risk in generative AI: Influencing swift trust and swift distrust. Southeast Decision Sciences Institute Conference Proceedings.