I remember my first cell phone. I remember my first laptop. I remember my first navigation system in my car, and gosh, that was cool.

I also remember my first big-girl communications job in 2000, when getting a magazine to the printer meant packaging QuarkXPress files onto a Zip disk (if you know, you know). Then came flash drives. Then burned CDs. Then, one miraculous day, we could just email a PDF in seconds.

That is the strange thing about being Gen X. We are not digital natives, but we were embedded in the workforce when technology grew up. We did not arrive with smartphones in our hands. We arrived with a work ethic and a decent tolerance for learning (if we must). Then technology started changing everything about how we worked and lived.

So, while we did not exactly grow up with technology, we did grow up alongside it.

Tulsan, Tammy Torkleson, understands that better than most.

Torkleson, founder and CEO of Indigo Technology Group and KŌM Analytics, has spent her career close to what comes next. Her résumé includes American Airlines, TV Guide, TiVo, and Roku. She helped build the data platform for the TV Guide Channel, created technology tied to smart-TV interfaces used by Samsung, Sony and LG, and built Roku’s advertising platform from zero in ad revenue to $50 million in three years.

Her work can sound intensely technical from a distance. But talking with Torkleson, the technology is not the most interesting part. The more interesting part is how consistently she brings it back to people.

“I am a technologist who lives on the bleeding edge of technology,” she says. “I look for problems in an industry, and I look for ways of solving them through technology. And it’s not solving it for solving’s sake. It’s quality of life.”

That line reframes the whole conversation. Torkleson is not interested in technology as decoration. She is interested in what it can make easier, smarter, safer, or more humane.

“We don’t live to work,” she says. “We work to live.”

Building Technology Businesses in Tulsa

Torkleson founded Indigo Technology Group in Tulsa in 2016 after leaving Roku. By then, she had already raised three children and had a young son at home. The travel that had defined much of her career was becoming harder to justify.

“I was tired of traveling all the time,” she says. “I had this kid that was six years old, and I had raised three others, and they were pretty much out of the house. God gave me one more chance to spend time with my children.”

Indigo was started to help small and mid-sized healthcare systems access their information in a way that was clean, useful, and affordable. To fund the analytics platform she wanted to build, she and her business partner, Kevin, began working with startups and early-stage founders, many of them nontechnical.

That work became a business of its own. Indigo has helped launch more than 30 companies in the Tulsa ecosystem since 2016. Today, Torkleson describes it as a startup studio that builds software for early-stage companies and creates “gap software” for companies that need something unique built, then maintained internally.

KŌM Analytics, founded in 2025, is different. “It’s KŌM, like combing through your data,” she says.

KŌM is the product she had been working toward from the beginning: an analytics platform designed to help organizations collect information from many systems and turn it into something leaders and staff can use.

“KŌM is an organizational tool,” Torkleson says. “We allow an organization to collect and access information from all of its various systems.”

In senior living, that might include financial systems, electronic medical records, HR, payroll, dining systems, and resident surveys. KŌM brings those pieces into a centralized place, then reports back the information the organization needs to make better decisions.

Sometimes that means finding operational savings. A senior living community may learn that residents want good food, but not oversized portions or expensive items that mostly end up wasted. Sometimes it means surfacing clues that may help staff intervene sooner, such as noticing when a resident is spending more time alone in front of the television.

“It’s not always the big things that are saving a million dollars,” she says. “It’s knowing your resident and understanding their behaviors and habits.”

Then she says the line that may best explain KŌM’s purpose: “We change you from a data gatherer to a data consumer.”

As someone who works around data, I loved that. Data by itself is not intelligence. It is just stuff. Usually lots of stuff. Often in six systems, three dashboards, and multiple spreadsheets. The value comes when the information can be understood and used by the people making decisions.

For Torkleson, senior living became a focus because the need was so clear.

“They desperately need this help,” she says. “And their budgets are so tight.”

The industry is highly regulated and deeply dependent on people, especially nurses and care teams. Much of the required tracking is still manual. That has consequences.

“If it’s manually done by nurses, then guess what the nurses are not doing?” she says. “They’re not taking care of patients.”

AI, Data, and the Future of Work

KŌM is also using artificial intelligence, but Torkleson talks about it with the calm of someone who has seen more than one technology wave arrive wearing a cape.

“If you got onto Claude.ai and tried to write an app, you could,” she says. “But it wouldn’t look anything or behave anything like the one I would write.”

Within KŌM, the company has created a closed large language model that can leverage the client’s own data store, a significant distinction in healthcare, where privacy and compliance are not optional. But Torkleson says AI should only be added when an organization is ready.

“It’s anything that can augment the way they have access to the information,” she says, “but it’s not an AI tool for AI’s sake.”

Torkleson has lived through major shifts before. She started at American Airlines, moving data from one mainframe to another during the company’s global expansion. Later, at TV Guide, she helped turn 50 years of entertainment data into intellectual property.

So, when people panic about AI taking every job, she has some perspective.

“This time feels very reminiscent of the early ’90s, where we went from mainframe to relational database,” she says. “I’ve kind of lived through this before. Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s going to take all of our jobs.’ I’m like, no. There’s going to be 50 new jobs that are going to come out of it that you can’t even imagine exist.”

That does not mean building in tech is easier now. In some ways, she says, it is harder.

“There’s a level of trust that is difficult to achieve because there’s so much bad software out there,” she says.

And Indigo was different from consulting because it came with employees and families attached.

“When I started Indigo, it was the first time that I had employees, like families depended on me and my capacity to do things,” she says. “If things go really bad, then it’s not just my life that’s affected. It’s a whole bunch of other people as well.”

Tammy Torkleson on Tulsa and Technology

That sense of responsibility shows up in how she talks about Tulsa.

Though she was born in Tucson, Arizona, Torkleson only lived there nine months before her parents came back to Tulsa. Her roots here run deep. Her parents graduated from Will Rogers High School in 1966. Her grandfather retired from American Airlines, which meant she grew up traveling the world on flight privileges.

“For me, Tulsa was never small,” she says. “It was just home.”

Torkleson saw the world, but she did not need to leave Tulsa to feel bigger.

“As I would travel around the world, everybody would say, ‘You live where?’” she says. “I wanted to start a company here because it was kind of a chip on my shoulder to say we can be great here. There are really talented people here. I can build a business here. I can find the talent I need here. I don’t have to go somewhere else. And it’s been true.”

Still, she does not think Tulsa should try to become Austin or the Bay Area.

“That’s not who we are,” she says. “It’s really not our DNA.”

Instead, she believes Tulsa’s strength is in becoming a tech-enabled city, using technology to strengthen manufacturing, energy, aerospace and the industries already central to the region’s economy.

“Tulsa is an innovative city by definition,” she says. “We’re very creative. We’re very curious as a culture.”

That curiosity is also central to how she thinks about being Gen X. The personal computer showed up in schools while her generation was learning to type. They learned on typewriters and computers, in analog and digital, before the internet and after it changed everything.

“The conditions were right for us to be curious. To be unafraid,” she says. “We knew how to drink out of a water hose. We didn’t come home until the lights went out.”

Tech Smart Seniors and Cybersecurity

Torkleson’s curiosity extends well beyond her companies. She serves on advisory councils, mentors students, judges pitch competitions, and is a founding member and chair of the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Technology Council. Her philosophy is rooted in faith and service.

“It is what we do, not what we say,” she says.

She also recently partnered with ProBound.AI to create Tech Smart Seniors, a group technology and cybersecurity workshop for older adults. The idea came after Torkleson had bought yet another new cell phone for her father because he had clicked on something he should not have.

Her hope for older adults is simple: slow down before reacting.

“When you get this, don’t react. Wait,” she says. “The scammers are hoping that you just react.”

“Take some time,” she says. “Nothing’s that urgent. Give it a minute.”

What Torkleson Has Learned Along the Way

Torkleson is also mom to four boys, has three grandsons, and is married to her husband, Craig, who she credits with making her career possible. As she traveled through Luxembourg, Asia, South America, the Caribbean, and across the country, she tried to make her time at home intentional.

“It wasn’t about bringing back gifts,” she says. “It was about letting them taste the cultures that I was a part of.”

When I asked what she would tell her 40-year-old self now, she did not overcomplicate it.

“Patience is a virtue,” she says.

Technology will keep changing. It always has. It will move too fast, make wild promises, break things, fix things, and demand that we learn yet another tool before we have fully forgiven the last one.

But the point is not to chase every new thing.

The point is to build what helps.

And for Torkleson, that work is happening here, in the city that was never small to her. Just home.