A CTO who has done this exact job before
BrightStar Care, one of the largest home care franchise networks in the United States, named Amer Waheed as its new chief technology officer this week. Waheed joins most recently from Fuze Health, where he served as CTO and built healthcare technology and AI experience. Before that, he spent more than six years as CTO of Neighborly, the home services franchise organization behind brands like Molly Maid and Mr. Handyman, where he led a digital transformation and built a consumer facing mobile app.
That franchise specific background is the point. Running technology for a franchise network is a distinct discipline from running it for a single operating company, because every platform decision has to work for independent franchise owners with varying budgets, staff turnover, and local operating conditions, not just for a centralized headquarters team.
Why BrightStar Care needed franchise experience specifically
CEO Josh Wall said Waheed's experience scaling platforms at a large franchise organization makes him 'exactly the right leader to guide our technology into the next phase of growth.' That framing matters: BrightStar Care did not describe the hire around a specific AI product launch or a flagship digital initiative, it described the hire around operational scale across a distributed network of independently owned locations.
Home care franchising carries operational pressures that differ from most other franchise categories. Caregiver scheduling has to account for credentialing, client matching, and last minute coverage gaps, often with thin staffing margins. A CTO who has already solved comparable scheduling and field operations problems at Neighborly's trades focused franchise network brings a transferable playbook rather than a theoretical one.
Healthcare AI experience as the second qualification
Waheed's time at Fuze Health adds a second, complementary credential: direct exposure to healthcare technology and AI in a sector with real compliance and privacy constraints. Home care sits at the intersection of healthcare and franchise services, so a CTO needs fluency in both HIPAA adjacent data handling and the realities of franchise unit economics, not just one or the other.
Earlier in his career, Waheed also worked at Sabre, the travel technology company, where he helped build consumer facing dynamic pricing and scheduling capabilities. That is a less obvious credential for a home care company, but dynamic scheduling under supply constraints is structurally similar across industries, and the skill likely transfers directly to caregiver shift matching.
The named priorities tell the real story
BrightStar Care said Waheed will modernize scheduling, caregiver and client engagement, and field operations platforms, and help franchise owners adopt technology that makes their businesses easier to run. Each of those is an operational system, not a customer facing product, which signals the company is prioritizing internal efficiency and franchisee adoption over a public facing AI feature.
That is a deliberately unglamorous roadmap, and it is probably the right one. Franchise networks succeed or fail based on whether individual owners actually use the tools corporate builds for them. A scheduling platform that reduces no show rates and administrative overhead for a single franchise location is worth more to BrightStar Care's growth than almost any flashier AI feature would be.
What this means beyond home care
For CIOs and CTOs at other franchise or multi location service businesses, this hire is a useful data point on where the executive labor market is pricing franchise specific operating experience. Waheed's path, three CTO roles across travel, home services franchising, and healthcare, suggests that operators who can demonstrate success scaling technology across independently owned locations are becoming a distinct and sought after category of technology leader.
It also reinforces a broader point for any enterprise rolling out AI or new platforms across a distributed, franchise, or dealer network: adoption by the people on the ground, not the sophistication of the technology itself, is usually the binding constraint. BrightStar Care's own framing of the hire, around helping franchise owners adopt technology, puts that constraint front and center rather than treating it as an afterthought.
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