Company culture forever changed when remote work became the norm. In a remote-first work environment, maintaining a sense of community and shared purpose can be challenging. However, at Metis Strategy, we believe in the importance of making time for in-person collaboration, even when we are miles apart. Our Day of Service exemplifies this commitment, as associates, managers, and partners from across the country gather regionally to make a positive impact in their local communities.
This year, teams in D.C., Houston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, and more participated in service activities centered around the theme of sustainability. As we head back to our respective offices, we’re grateful for the opportunity to connect with colleagues, uniting behind the common goal of helping others.
The Bay Area Squad worked with Indigenous Permaculture, an urban farming group that uses regenerative farming practices to feed those in need across the San Francisco and East Bay Area. The team mulched, weeded, planted, and fixed irrigation lines on their Treasure Island plot. The day was both productive and educational, as the team learned about the importance of sustainable agriculture and community partnerships in empowering communities to develop self-sustainable ways of living.
“It was interesting learning about how pairing certain plants next to each other can act as a natural pesticide,” said Becca Salisbury, an associate on the West Coast team. “We also enjoyed learning how this group teams up with local farms and restaurants to distribute food about to go bad to those in need.”
Surrounded by nature, coworkers, and a spirit of collaboration, the team not only gave back to the community but also gained a deeper understanding of the crucial role local wildlife ecosystems play in supporting sustainable farming practices. It was a powerful reminder of the impact that collaboration, and just a little bit of mulch, can have in nurturing both the environment and the community.
Across the country, the D.C.-based Titans gathered in support of the Rock Creek Conservatory, a watershed organization aimed at restoring, protecting, and supporting the natural oasis of Rock Creek Park. This group, which included our President Peter High, took on the task of picking up trash around the parklands.
“D.C. is such a beautiful city, and it felt good to contribute to that maintenance effort for a few hours,” said Jillian Fielder, an associate from the East Coast team who organized the event. “At the end of the day, we had a few decently full bags of trash which included everything from Styrofoam packing materials to beer bottles to candy bar wrappers. I’m really proud that Metis Strategy continues to make community engagement and service a firm-wide focus.”
The day was marked by teamwork and a shared sense of purpose, showcasing these Titans’ commitment to environmental stewardship and community engagement. Following the event, the team gathered in the park to celebrate with a Capo Deli lunch.
Our Titans in Texas made a strong impact, representing Metis Strategy across Dallas, Houston, and Austin. Kelley Dougherty, Eva Maxcy, and Katherine Kennedy spent the day sorting food donations with Meals for Kids Houston, an organization whose mission is to end childhood hunger by delivering healthy meals directly to the homes of children in the Houston area facing extreme hunger.
In recent weeks, the Houston area experienced unprecedented severe weather, which caused the Meals for Kids warehouse to lose power and forced the organization to discard a significant amount of perishable goods that had gone bad without refrigeration. “You could tell the organization was very worried that the weather issues would impact their ability to provide food for these kids,” said Kelley. “It felt great to be part of the community that stepped up to make sure that wouldn’t happen.”
The Houston-based trio couldn’t have stepped in at a better time, joining a community-wide effort to support an organization in a time of need. While everyone was united in the common purpose of community service, a friendly sorting competition also served as an exercise in teamwork.
The Day of Service was a major success across Metis Strategy. In addition to the stories shared above, Titans in other parts of the country also found ways to meet up, volunteer, and spend valuable time together without a screen in between.
At Metis Strategy, the Day of Service is more than just another company event; it serves as a reminder for us all to give back to our communities and strengthen our interpersonal relationships at work and beyond. We are proud of the dedication and hard work displayed by all of our teams and look forward to continuing this tradition of service and collaboration for years to come.
This article was written by Leila Shaban, Research Associate at Metis Strategy
Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the 17th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. Highlights from the event are below. Check out Metis Strategy’s Youtube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of each conversation.
Companies continue to make progress in their AI journeys, deploying the technology to drive efficiency, productivity and innovation. Technology leaders are focused now on driving adoption, generating buy-in for new initiatives, and rolling out new training programs to ensure teams across the enterprise are able to take advantage of what AI has to offer. Below are a few highlights from the event:
Building a foundation for AI at scale
Nearly all CIOs on stage said scalable infrastructure and high-quality, accessible data are key to driving value from AI initiatives. Over the past few years, many organizations have focused on building data platforms, shifting to cloud and rethinking ways of working in order to deliver AI at scale. “Having a really good data infrastructure is foundational to taking advantage of any of these generative AI capabilities,” Priceline CTO Marty Brodbeck said. Many speakers noted their current efforts to get reliable data into the hands of more teams across their organizations.
Nearly half of MSDS attendees said that the rapid evolution of AI, among other macro issues, will have the biggest impact on their organizations in the year ahead
Exploring new use cases
Many organizations continue to train generative AI on internal knowledge bases to streamline processes and enable more self service. CIOs also see potential around developer productivity.
Bristol Myers Squibb receives thousands of calls from physicians and nurse practitioners each day requesting information about specific, often technical, topics, Chief Digital and Technology Officer Greg Meyers said. MDs on the other side of the call often find those answers in internal documents. Now, an AI chatbot trained on the company’s knowledge base can search through the documents to retrieve answers to these questions much faster. With enough fine tuning, Meyers noted the chatbot could constrain search results to trusted documents and help agents provide near-immediate answers to customer queries.
At UPS, Chief Digital and Technology Officer Bala Subramanian recently launched an internal AI tool for email which can process the tens of thousands of customer emails UPS receives on a daily basis, connect relevant information across internal policies and procedures, and generate responses for contact center employees. This ultimately improves worker productivity and reduces response time. UPS also launched an AI chatbot to help employees answer HR questions. Subramanian noted that the company is proceeding slowly due to the sensitive information and personal data in HR systems, and emphasized the critical role of risk management and governance.
At AstraZeneca, AI is significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to conduct research. Cindy Hoots, Chief Digital and Information Officer, described a generative AI-enabled research assistant that quickly searches both internal and external data to answer complex scientific questions. The assistant has helped reduce the time it takes to conduct a literature review from months to minutes, she said. Hoots is now focused on scaling AI adoption. About 15,000 employees use the research assistant, she said, while roughly 5,000 use Copilot solutions and almost 80,000 have access to AstraZeneca’s internal ChatGPT.
At KB Home, employees evaluate a number land deals across 35 markets every week. Aggregating property data from different sources to determine whether to make an acquisition used to take 30-90 days, CIO Greg Moore said. With AI, KB Home can now complete the process in less than two weeks. The faster turnaround now enables the company to make more evaluations and manage more potential deals in the pipeline.
Developer productivity is another area of rapid experimentation. Many of the tools offered by major vendors are in their early days and have room to grow, said Brodbeck of Priceline. The team is exploring solutions that can learn from Priceline’s codebase and provide a richer and more contextual experience. Whether for code generation or another use case, Brodbeck said companies will likely need to deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver more productivity.
At Augment, CEO Scott Dietzen is thinking about how to retrieve knowledge from internal codebases in a way that protects intellectual property and reduces the risk of leaking sensitive information. The team started with basic engineering tasks that can make developers more productive rather than trying to replace them altogether. Demand for these kinds of tools will last for at least a decade as organizations produce more software, Dietzen said.
The top use cases for digital assistants/copilots that are driving the most value for MSDS attendees are code generation, self-service chatbots, and enterprise search/knowledge management
Bringing the organization along on the AI journey
To drive a common understanding and widespread adoption of AI, CIOs have increased their focus on storytelling and talent development.
At Wilson Sonsini, Chief Information Officer Michael Lucas is focused on cascading AI communications across the firm. His team started with a general awareness campaign. That included employee town halls to communicate the broader strategy as well as AI-centric briefings to partners. Given the sea of media coverage about AI, Lucas encouraged leaders to develop their own elevator pitch to help their organizations clearly understand the company’s AI strategy. Driving a common understanding across the firm is key to driving adoption. “We feel like we need to learn, understand, enrich, and then apply and operationalize,” Lucas said.
At Liberty Mutual, Global Chief Information Officer Monica Caldas is delivering customized employee training and connecting it to the company’s capacity demands across 27 countries. It’s part of a workforce strategy plan called “skills to fuel our future.” First, the company surveyed more than 5,000 employees to determine their skill level around topics like data, data engineering and software engineering. Next, the company mapped over 150 skills, connected them to 18 domains, and assessed how and where to invest in training.
Now, Caldas and her team are helping employees apply that training to a variety of career paths. Instead of a traditional career development ladder, Liberty Mutual is evaluating how to map skills to different jobs and create a “jungle gym” or “lattice of opportunities.” The focus on specific skills, Caldas said, “will help you position your capabilities as a tech organization not just for today, but also plan out where it’s going.”
Education at the executive level is also critical. To bring executives along on the journey, Caldas introduced a program called Executech that helps improve organizational data literacy and elevates the digital IQ of decision makers. Enhancing teams’ tech acumen gives leaders the confidence to start conversations early about important technology topics like API integration.
AI adoption may not be uniform, and there is still lots to learn about how it will impact specific roles. At Eli Lilly, employees who have incorporated AI tools into their workflow are reluctant to give them up, said Diogo Rau, Chief Information and Digital Officer. However, widespread adoption is a continuous and sometimes challenging process, “a lot harder than anyone would guess,” Rau said.
Rau often gets more questions about the risks of AI than how it can be used to improve products and services. Another challenge is that teams excited about creating AI bots aren’t always excited about maintaining or training them. “There are lots of good firefighters, but not every firefighter wants to be a fire inspector,” he said.
62% of technology executives who attended the Metis Strategy Digital Symposium anticipate that the most significant impact that AI will have on talent is increased productivity
Leveraging ecosystem partners
Achieving the transformative potential of generative AI will require collaborating with networks of vendors, startups, peers, and academics. In addition to providing technology solutions, these ecosystem partners can help upskill employees, explore emerging challenges, and prototype new use cases.
Amir Kazmi, Chief Information and Digital Officer at WestRock, draws learnings from both established technology partners and startups. He also brings in academics and peers from other companies to share wins and lessons learned about generative AI.
Regal Rexnord’s Tim Dickson, Chief Digital and Information Officer, uses hackathons and internal events with vendor partners to increase the company’s digital IQ. The company also offers self-paced training from about 10 partners that includes pathways to certification. In the past seven months, more than 100 employees have received training on GenAI fundamentals from Databricks and robotic process automation from UiPath, as well as certifications from Microsoft Copilot. Even if employees don’t use these tools every day, increasing the number of people with technical skills means more individuals “can at least help, or even lead, these initiatives across the organization,” Dickson said.
CommScope CIO Praveen Jonnala, like many other technology executives, is thinking about how to drive a cultural shift around AI. He spends about 80% of his time on organizational change management and culture. He is also leaning into existing partnerships to take advantage of new AI solutions and educate teams. For example, he took business teams to Microsoft for a full day to learn more about the technology and its ability to unlock new business opportunities.
This article was written by Rana Abbaszadeh, a Senior Associate in Metis Strategy’s West Coast Office
As companies look for ways to harness data and AI to deliver on business outcomes, they first need to develop the foundational governance capability that enables them to do so effectively. Data governance requires significant time and resource investment, to be sure, but it ultimately enables organizations to realize the long-term value from their AI and analytics initiatives.
At a high level, data governance refers to the development and management of information about an organization’s data. It includes maintaining a catalog of a company’s data from lineage to definition and utilization. When done well, data governance creates a single source of truth that can be used to unlock trusted insights, inform strategic decision making, and enable personalization at scale.
Companies that implement data governance can:
- Develop a reliable source of data to improve business outcomes and performance
- Enhance data security and quality
- Improve compliance with data protection laws and regulations
Metis Strategy takes a strategic approach to data governance and recommends that organizations start with the data that drives significant value. For example, a retail company could focus first on the governance of customer and product data, as this information is core to the company’s growth. Focusing on high-value data helps generate buy-in from key stakeholders and builds momentum for governance initiatives. After that, organizations can turn to other data until governance becomes embedded into the company culture.
This article will outline how to develop a data governance program within your organization, including the different roles and stakeholders involved.
Identifying governance opportunities
Using the Metis Strategy methodology, organizations can quickly realize value while improving overall data maturity. We recommend developing a cross-functional steering committee consisting of senior leaders across business and technology units who will guide the governance process. The steering committee is responsible for setting strategy, direction, and prioritization for the data governance program.
The committee’s primary responsibilities include:
- Identifying high ROI use cases. Create a framework for determining the value of a governance project versus its expected cost. High ROI use cases may include governing customer and product data, financial data, or any sensitive consumer data. Once the use case has been chosen, identify the data required.
- Developing an MVP for the organization. After selecting an initial use case, create a governance council to implement the program. Leaders should ensure the program aligns with the organization’s business strategy and requirements. Once aligned, data cataloging can begin. This involves providing consistent definitions for data and managing data’s lineage. After this process is complete, the data is ready to be used by the organization.
- Monitoring progress and repeating with new use cases. The steering committee will oversee the MVP in action, monitoring adoption and measuring return on investment. These metrics help frame the business case for future governance initiatives, with the ultimate goal being an enterprise-level data governance capability.
In addition to the responsibilities above, the committee also will evaluate the business case for specific initiatives, approve funding and resource requests, and guide program adoption throughout the enterprise.
Building the Governance Council
In addition to the steering committee, the data governance program should include a governance council that will scope, document, and monitor data assets and lead governance operations. The council should consist of individuals across different business units to provide varied perspectives across domains. Members take on roles such as data owner, steward and custodian to ensure accurate data sets for their respective business units. A high-level overview of this is shown below.
The Data Governance Council consists of several roles with varying responsibilities. Metis Strategy recommends the council have at least the following three roles:
- Business data owners are responsible for providing guidance and recommendations as to how data is used within their domain and have ultimate authority over business unit data. They have a domain-specific understanding of how data is used and manage data definitions, utilization and cost.
- Data stewards and custodians ensure data-related work is performed according to operating procedures set forth by the business data owners. They are responsible for defining usage permissions and policies, and working across business and technology teams to identify, define and standardize data at the implementation level, managing issues as they arise.
- Delivery execution teams are data or IT teams responsible for data modeling, usage tracking and access management defined by the data stewards and custodians. They ensure data is available, accessible, well performing and recoverable.
Business unit end users
Business unit end users will have access to trusted data based on their business unit needs and role requirements. They will collaborate with the business data owners to ensure maximum utility of the enterprise data.
Conclusion
Data governance is critical to ensuring the success of strategic data projects across any organization. Having the right structures in place will enable a faster return on investment and allow the governance capability to scale throughout the organization. As more high-value use cases come to life, analytics and AI teams will be empowered to use trusted data to improve business performance, enhance the customer experience and improve operational efficiency.
Companies have had great success in initial governance efforts, unlocking the utilization of customer and product data to help drive product design and improve sales outcomes. For example, after developing a governance program around its consumer and product data, one retailer improved the personalization of a merchandising ad unit by 17% through an enhanced understanding of user engagement and behavioral patterns. Success in this area helped the company make the business case for future analytics and AI use cases. In this case, a strong data governance capability built confidence and momentum for the organization as it continued to scale its analytics efforts.
To learn more about developing a robust data governance program, please contact us at information@metisstrategy.com
CHEVY CHASE, MD., May 15, 2024 – Metis Strategy, a strategy and management consulting firm purpose-built for digital and technology leaders, is proud to receive the 2024 Great Place To Work Certification™ for the second consecutive year. Great Place To Work is the global authority on workplace culture, employee experience, and leadership behaviors proven to deliver market-leading revenue, employee retention, and increased innovation.
The prestigious award is based entirely on what current employees say about their experience working at Metis Strategy. This year, an outstanding 90% of our employees have affirmed that Metis Strategy is a great place to work, significantly surpassing the national average. Furthermore, our employees unanimously rated our services as “excellent” and expressed that they felt welcomed upon joining our company.
“We are honored to have earned the Great Place To Work Certification™ for the second consecutive year,” said Metis Strategy President Peter High. “I am profoundly grateful to everyone at Metis Strategy for fostering a welcoming culture and consistently embodying our core values. I extend my heartfelt thanks to our team for their trust and endorsement, and I am proud of them for this well-deserved recognition, which reflects the collaborative workplace they foster at our firm.”
From premier C-level counsel to strategy-setting and execution, clients partner with Metis Strategy at critical points in their business journeys. With a focus on enriching business leadership through in-depth content and active relationships, Metis has earned a reputation as the trusted advisor to senior executives at the nexus of business, technology, and innovation. Metis Strategy has also been recognized as one of the Top 50 Boutique Consulting Firms to Work for in North America by Vault and one of the Fastest-Growing Companies in the Americas by the Financial Times for two consecutive years.
About Metis Strategy: With more than two decades of experience, Metis Strategy is a boutique strategy and management consulting firm focused on the intersection of business, technology, and innovation. Serving mainly Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies, areas of specialty include business strategy, digital transformation, technology strategy and operations, growth and scale strategy, and organizational change. We help define new products or services for clients, design improved customer and employee experiences through digital capabilities, and advise organizations on how they can achieve favorable business outcomes more efficiently and effectively.
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Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in the 16th Metis Strategy Digital Symposium. Highlights from the event are below. If you missed the event, check out Metis Strategy’s Youtube channel and Technovation podcast in the coming weeks for recordings of each conversation.
Our next event will take place May 21. More details and an agenda coming soon. CXOs, are you interested in attending? If so, kindly register here. We look forward to seeing you!
The COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chain challenges and the broad resurgence of artificial intelligence created a sense of urgency among many technology leaders to modernize and improve their organizations’ digital capabilities. Today, many companies are beginning to see the results of those investments and talking about the strategic ways technology can continue to enable innovation and resilience. Tech leaders recognize the importance of playing both offense and defense as they continue to navigate an uncertain business landscape, and the continued need to align talent and business strategies as they plan for future growth.
Investing in resilience
Some leaders outside IT may argue that there is never a good time to invest in IT. But given how quickly the competitive landscape is changing, organizations can’t afford to pause. For CIOs, a question is where – and when – to make those strategic investments.
“It’s much more beneficial to invest in a downturn than in an upcycle,” said Gates Corporation CIO Diego Silva. During a downturn, there is more capacity and willingness for people to drive change, put new skills into practice, and move projects forward. The greater acceptance for change gives companies the opportunity to drive productivity and resilience, and ultimately put them in a position of strength when the next upswing comes around.
Indeed, many organizations took advantage of time during the pandemic to invest in digital capabilities. When the world was in “shutdown mode,” Sunbelt Rentals Chief Digital & Technology Officer JP Saini invested in the organization’s omnichannel retail capabilities, talent development, new innovation models, and other initiatives to strengthen the resilience and adaptability of the enterprise. As Metis Strategy partner Chris Davis notes: “Businesses are cyclical, but progress and innovation don’t have to be.”
MSDS attendees shared that the biggest barriers to advancing and maintaining digital capabilities are legacy operating models and legacy infrastructure
Managing both offense and defense
True transformation means not just building innovative products and services but also ensuring that all the processes that support those innovations are running as they should. For CIOs, that means playing both offense and defense well.
At pharmaceutical firm GSK, innovation has long been a core competency. As leaders discussed transforming parts of the organization, there was growing recognition that the company had to balance playing offense and defense, playing to win rather than “playing not to lose.” Offense includes those digital and data capabilities at the core of a company’s strategy, while defense-oriented activities may focus on areas like responsible AI and cybersecurity. It becomes a virtuous cycle, GSK Chief Digital & Technology Officer Shobie Ramakrishnan said. “Defense in service of the offense becomes important.”
Tech modernization is another area where offense and defense must be balanced. As Grainger CTO Jonny LeRoy noted, organizations that have been early adopters have a duty to tend to the IT garden over time, “to keep the weeds out.” Putting that into practice, Grainger is focused on the mechanics of how it grows, using its understanding of processes like customer acquisition and inventory management to guide the continuous development of its systems and solutions. Meanwhile, Grainger keeps an eye on the horizon and experiments with new technology as it comes so it can be ready for what’s next.
Continuously improving
Responding to a fast-changing market requires organizations to deploy new capabilities quickly and pivot when necessary. That requires a mindset of continuous improvement and a constant search for opportunities to align people, process and technology toward a common outcome.
Consider a zero-day cybersecurity vulnerability, one that takes advantage of an unknown or unaddressed issue and needs to be fixed immediately. Jen Felch, Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell, said the best way to be prepared is “not only to take care of it early, but figure out how to get fast.” While some may view behavior or process change as antithetical to speed, the efforts to make those changes and continuously improve can be major levers to increase speed and efficiency.
Felch recognizes the desire for continuous improvement among teams as well, not only to build skills but also to see the results of their work. Rapid experimentation cycles have helped, she said: “let’s see what we can do in two weeks and build on that and see how it goes.” Giving appropriate context, bringing in knowledge from across the organization, and encouraging a test-and-learn mindset can also drive empowerment across teams. On the process side, constantly improving data quality, information retrieval methods and learning opportunities have also aided progress.
The top talent efforts that technology executives are focused on to advance AI are widespread education/upskilling and scaling AI-based productivity tools
Adopting new ways of working
Technology leaders are also adapting their talent strategies to better suit their strategic goals. Barry Perkins, COO at Zurich North America, noted that having a majority of technology employees in India limited productivity and agility. Noting “ABCD” – AI, Big Data, Cyber, and Development – as four critical digital capabilities, the company has begun to reassess its talent strategy, including which roles should be closer to headquarters. “We can’t have agility if we’re having conversations thousands of miles away with different time zones,” he said. “It’s much easier side by side.”
Effective talent management also requires leaders to inspire teams about the organization’s future vision and help team members see their place in the plan. As Brinks Inc. CIO Neelu Sethi said, transformation of any sort is less about technology and more about people. She is working to create a true “three-legged stool” of people, process and technology rather than letting a single element be the focus.She also reiterated the need for true collaboration. “You cannot whistle a symphony,” she said. “It takes an orchestra.”
At Travelers, preparing talent for large-scale change has involved a focus on four areas: Customer First; Empower and Act; Test and Learn; and Prioritize. Chief Technology and Operations Officer Mojgan Lefebvre also emphasized the need for effective communication to drive trust and accountability through transparency. “People want to play a role,” she said. “Bringing them along and giving them that capability is important.”
A majority of MSDS participants are either experimenting with Copilots or other generative AI tools to enhance software developer productivity or scaling the adoption of these tools
Advancing generative AI adoption
Naturally, artificial intelligence continues to be a priority in 2024. After a year of initial exploration and education, many organizations are ramping up AI experiments and seeing ways to expand AI across the enterprise. Underpinning all of this exploration is a focus on value delivery and safety.
GSK established an AI policy and set up an AI governance council five years ago when the organization decided to scale AI across the company. Now, Ramakrishnan is thinking about additional risks around adoption and procurement to ensure AI can scale. Similarly, Travelers many years ago set up an AI accelerator team to explore potential use cases and create a framework for responsible AI use. Now, they are prioritizing a handful of use cases and in the process of scaling them across the organization.
“Generative AI is top of mind for every executive to accelerate their workforce and accelerate the products of the business,” said Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium. In a poll, participants said the biggest benefit to AI and generative AI adoption is increased productivity (67%), followed by improved products and services (17%). When it comes to advancing AI, 40% of attendees said talent efforts are focused on scaling AI-based productivity tools.
Around two-thirds of respondents see increased productivity as the biggest benefit to AI/generative AI adoption
Many speakers said they are currently using AI for use cases such as developer productivity and internal process automation. A key outcome: speed. “The more we eliminate the drudgery from the process, the more we can start to deliver value,” said Jen Felch of Dell. At Travelers, Levebvre’s team is exploring how generative AI can be an assistant or collaborator, such as quickly searching through and summarizing documents or helping team members access needed information. The company is also exploring how AI can be used to improve job descriptions and recruiting processes. Lefebvre noted that while many of their use cases are internally focused, they want to be able to scale the technology and “make it good before turning it around with customers” as there is also a lot of external value to capture.
At Grainger, LeRoy’s teams are experimenting with generative AI in technology (coding assistants) as well as customer service. Through internal hackathons, the technology team developed tools that are boosting employee productivity and allowing them to do more with a constrained budget. As use of these tools continues to scale, financial management becomes an important factor, LeRoy said. “Some of that is selecting the right model with the right capability level that’s not overly expensive, and managing how much information you put into them.”
Our next event will take place May 21. If you are a CXO and interested in attending, please register here.
Introduction
The California Gold Rush launched in 1848 when a sawmill operator stumbled upon a literal goldmine while building Sutter’s Mill in Sacramento, California. Nearly two centuries later, a figurative gold rush kicked off as individuals and companies across the globe sought to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI).
Looking back at Technovation podcast interviews from 2023, AI and adjacent technologies were easily the most talked about trends. Mentions of ChatGPT and GenAI soared through the rankings, going from a non-existent topic in 2022 to the second most frequently discussed trend on the podcast a year later.
The focus on GenAI brought with it a growing focus on AI more broadly, as well as cybersecurity, chatbots, and robotic process automation. It also spurred conversations about the possibilities of quantum computing and new opportunities to leverage data coming from a range of IoT sensors.
Technologies like blockchain and the metaverse took a backseat to AI this year, but many executives hypothesize that widespread adoption may yet be on the horizon.
Companies dive into generative AI
When generative AI became widely accessible to companies at the end of 2022, the possibilities seemed endless, spurring conversations about how it could reshape work.
Cisco Sanchez, SVP & CIO of Qualcomm, said he noticed an “anxiousness” within his organization to leverage that technology and show what was possible. Through the company’s Imagine platform, his team identified a number of use cases such as internal documentation search, image creation, and more.
Document summarization piqued the interest of DocuSign CIO Shanthi Iyer, who said GenAI could help clients quickly get answers to questions about their contracts, including which parties were involved, start and end dates, fiscal terms, and even potential risks.
GenAI’s rise also renewed conversations around voice assistants and chatbots. Tracy Kerrins, CIO of Wells Fargo, announced that the company completed 100% consumer rollout of a new virtual agent named “Fargo” that can be accessed through the company’s mobile app. The assistant “helps improve [the customer’s] banking experience and give them the information they may not have even known they needed when they need it,” Kerrins said. Powered by Google’s AI Dialogue Flow solution, “Fargo” is seen internally as the company’s first step toward adopting GenAI and paving the way for its expansion.
Those keeping a close eye on technology trends surely saw GenAI on the horizon, but few could have predicted the speed of its adoption. It’s safe to say that going into 2024, the topic of GenAI will remain strong, with new insights on where it makes sense to deploy the technology, what value it poses to the overall business, and what risk factors need to be considered to drive a successful AI strategy.
A renewed focus on data quality and value delivery
To take advantage of the opportunities presented by AI and GenAI, organizations noted the need for a sound data strategy and quality data management practices to act as a foundation. Kristie Grinnell, CIO of DXC Technology, emphasized the need for strong data fundamentals in the age of AI. “Is this data I can count on, take action on, make a decision on?,” asked Grinnell, “Because then, I’m going to run analytics over it to start predicting things for the future.” Without reliable data, she warned, companies could face “disastrous” results.
Filippo Catalano, CIDO of Reckitt, echoed this sentiment as well, describing GenAI as a “lens” on top of the data already collected. “You need to have your data analytics strategy in place,” said Catalano, “Frankly, if you don’t have good data practices… you will not be able to generate competitive advantage.”
Mentions of the Internet of Things and sensor-based technology have steadily declined in mentions over the last few years of podcast interviews. However, this doesn’t appear to be due to declining interest. Rather, sensors are now ubiquitous in many companies, collecting and feeding data back to the IT organization. To many executives, the more pressing topic wasn’t the implementation of sensors themselves, but the data coming from them and the value this data can deliver.
Johnson Controls CIO Vijay Sankaran remains steadfast in the use of IoT sensors in the real estate sector. The data his team collects has a wide range of applications, including mapping facilities to optimize the usage of physical space and improve employee experience. Similarly, at commercial lightning supplier Signify, CDIO Tony Thomas leverages the data about how customers use its smart light bulbs to help the company figure out how to evolve its product and service offerings.
At ConocoPhillips, real-time sensor data is giving the company more visibility into its drill sites than ever before, allowing it to more closely monitor equipment and learn about potential issues before they happen. Using IoT sensors to get real-time data “is allowing us to do deep analytics, machine learning, AI, and monitoring opportunities that we were never able to do before,” said CDIO Pragati Mathur.
Heading into 2024, data remains at the top of the CIO agenda as organizations seek new ways to collect, analyze, and act upon information to drive value.
Cybersecurity and data privacy are top of mind with concerns surrounding AI
With data being as valuable as it is, securing it is non-negotiable. The ever-present need to build consumer trust and protect enterprise data ensures that cybersecurity is a trend that will persist and evolve. “Cybersecurity is never a business by itself,” said Gili Raanan, Co-Founder of Cyberstarts. “If technology changes and you’ve got artificial and generative AI,” said Raanan, “you probably need generative AI security.”
The inevitable cyber risks and ethical questions surrounding GenAI’s implementation were not lost on executives. Rajan Kumar, CIO of Intuit, has been on a journey to mature his organization’s data strategy that powers the services offered to clients. While collecting the necessary data is one area of focus, just as important is doing so with “the right guardrails around the security and privacy.”
Alina Parast, CIO of ChampionX, reiterated the need for cybersecurity before leveraging any AI capability. “We need to find a safe and secure home for our data before we apply AI,” she said. Parast applied internal security procedures and protections integrated into the Microsoft platforms she uses to ensure any application of AI doesn’t place data at risk. Parast also explained how cybersecurity practices extended beyond IT to become part of an overall mindset. “We want people to internalize that cybersecurity is something that doesn’t just belong to a small team in the corner,” she said, “but [that] it’s everybody’s responsibility.” To drive home this mindset, she developed an internal cybersecurity training program framed as a murder mystery mini-series, providing a fun alternative to routine corporate training modules.
Juan Perez, CIO of software-as-a-service platform Salesforce, said cybersecurity has been imperative to any initiative he undertook throughout his career. When describing his top five pillars as a CIO, Perez began and ended his list with the need to protect and secure the enterprise. “None of the other [pillars] matter if, at the end of the day, we’re not prioritizing the security of our environments and the security of the information that we have to guard so closely so that we protect the business’s interests.”
AI prompts conversations on new computing needs
As companies run bigger and faster models, the demand for compute has picked up. “You have to get the ROI out of [GenAI], and there’s a lot of compute power that is required,” said Vish Narendra, CIO of Graphic Packaging.
One such avenue is quantum computing. Douglas Lindemann, CIO of ArcBest Technologies, has a team dedicated to researching quantum. This research has informed Lindemann’s perspective on the role that quantum can play as enterprises continue their AI journeys. Through his team’s research, he was able to apply some of the learnings to ‘quantum-inspired optimization’ (QIO) that runs on classical computers to “make more efficient algorithms that can respond and provide responses in a quicker time” and “provide better, quicker model responses with some of our AI.”
Monica Caldas, CIO of Liberty Mutual, says quantum computing could change the way data is recorded and calculations are done. “I just think about the ability of the speed and the processing power that that will bring,” she said. As quantum capabilities advance, “how will that change how we do algorithms? How will that change how we process?”
Vanguard CIO Nitin Tandon agreed, citing the intersection of quantum and AI/ML tools was a trend he was particularly excited about. “We are talking about NVIDIA and GPUs today, but think about if we had qubits, GPUs and CPUs that you can harvest in whatever ratio you want to drive really powerful AI/ML engines.” However, like AI, the advent of quantum poses its share of risks. “It also has huge security implications, which we’re also cognizant of and working on.”
Other trends on CIOs’ minds
Continuing the path to cloud maturity
Cloud computing technology has been a trend often mentioned on Technovation, as many companies began their cloud journeys years ago. With strategies in place and transformations in progress, the conversation now is focused on how the cloud has and can continue to enable new processes.
Executives still see value in blockchain, mostly in financial services
Blockchain seemed poised to be a game-changing technology, but adoption has proved slower than many anticipated. Shubham Mehrish, Global VP of Mars, jokingly contrasted the successful takeoff of AI to the lukewarm response to blockchain. The rise of AI “ is not a blockchain/crypto moment. This is probably more real than that.”
Within the financial services industry, however, some see high potential for value-add use cases. Sumedh Mehta, CIO of Putnam Investments, said during a podcast interview earlier in the year that he sees blockchain as having the “potential for being the backbone of future global financial transactions.”
Lori Beer, CIO of J.P. Morgan, also sees the potential value of blockchain if it is done right. “When you think about all the processes that we have to comply with payments…there’s so many opportunities where you have to connect to other banks to understand information in that [know your customer] process to be able to know that you can go ahead.”
Co-founder and Co-chairman of The Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein, said crypto and the like are here to stay. “Crypto will be perfected at some point,” he said, “and probably it’ll be made more valuable in some ways down the road.”
The metaverse has been put on ice but isn’t being ignored
While the metaverse, augmented reality and virtual reality didn’t make the most-mentioned list this year, the emerging technology may still get its day.
As companies collect more revenue from digital channels, the metaverse could serve as a new frontier for customer interactions. “Whether it is immersive environments like the metaverse, your regular eCommerce shopping, or social media shopping, you can actually put prototypes of new products and designs, and see what the interest of consumers is,” said Katia Walsh, former Chief AI Officer of Levi’s. Metaverse technologies like VR may find some early adoption outside the consumer sector. ConocoPhillips has already started deploying tools to make full use of the capability when it arrives. “Today we use VR headsets for drilling locations and to interact with the machines and people without leaving our desks,” said Pragati Mathur. “How we extend that into the industrial metaverse is something … which is exciting.”
Paul Beswick’s pathway to become Chief Information Officer of Marsh McLennan is non-traditional to say the least. He joined the company via one of its operating companies, the strategy consultancy, Oliver Wyman. He rose through the ranks at that firm to become a partner and global head of Oliver Wyman Labs and global co-head of Oliver Wyman’s Digital Practice. “It all happened because I walked into the wrong meeting one day and got sucked into the project to design Marsh McLennan’s technology strategy with Scott Gilbert, who was my predecessor,” noted Beswick. “Then got sucked into trying to deliver it, which anyone who’s been a consultant should know, you should never do: you should never both write the strategy and take responsibility for delivering it.”
When he weighed the advantages of his pathway, he noted that he has been in executive committee meetings and boardrooms since he was in his 20s. He also acknowledged that having profit and loss responsibilities in various roles along his ascent at Oliver Wyman likely gives him a better appreciation of technology’s power to grow revenue for Marsh McLennan, not just where it can lead to cost savings.
Beswick’s current post has him overseeing technology for a conglomerate that includes Marsh, the world’s largest insurance broker, Mercer, leader in human resources, benefits, and investment consulting, Guy Carpenter which is in the business of reinsurance broking, along with Oliver Wyman. When he took over as chief information officer roughly three years ago, the company was in the throes of moving from a decentralized IT department to one that exerts much more influence from the center. “That’s a fairly new development in terms of how we’ve been organized. When I took on this role, we were starting the process of bringing what had been business unit-specific technology organizations together into one overall organization,” said Beswick. “Prior to that, we’d had different teams by business, but with a shared infrastructure and security organization in the middle. It’s been an interesting journey trying to forge one team out of what were quite independent teams before.”
Beswick sees a primary job of his as increasing the velocity of the business. “We do a lot of work to understand what slows us down, how we get tangled up in our own processes, where there’s bureaucracy that’s unnecessary, where we fail to engineer solutions to problems that we can engineer solutions to that can help things move significantly more quickly,” he underscored. “A huge chunk of where I spend my own time…is focused on trying to change the efficient frontier between speed, agility on the one hand, and security, compliance, robustness, and resilience, on the other.”
A primary pathway to this for Beswick and his team has been in building a platform strategy, building template projects and defining “patterns” that can be deployed readily, streamlining policy, compliance and nonfunctional aspects of every project that his organization undertakes. “One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve come into this job is how important understanding some of the organizational dynamics are and the points of inefficient but stable equilibrium that exist in organization structure that tend to lock you into patterns that are inefficient and thinking very deliberately about how you break through some of those things,” he said.
Beswick is excited about the amount of innovation driven by technology and his team’s ability to convey the art of the possible to the rest of the company. He thinks about technology in the spectrum of hard things to easy ones. “We are not in the game of doing really hard stuff,” he said. “That’s not the organization that we’re built for, but hard things get easier over time, and there’s this constant shift from more complicated and less accessible but powerful technology into things that are increasingly easy to get our hands on. At some point, there’s this tipping point where the hard becomes easy. If we can be there at the point where things become easy and we understand how to put them into action in a real business against our real processes and our real problems, that’s the area where I think we can create the most value. That requires you to be always playing around at the edge of that transition point and make sure you recognize when that transition has happened.”
A case in point is Marsh McLennan’s foray into generative artificial intelligence. It began by partnering with vendor partners, but that proved to be too expensive. However, when Microsoft made the OpenAI back-ends available in a secure fashion, Beswick and his team discovered that with a little bit of extra engineering, they could make that available to the broader company. The goal was to mirror the remarkable uptick in the use of ChatGPT in society. “I didn’t think we needed to spend a lot of time worrying about precisely what the use cases were,” Beswick admitted. “It felt like the use cases would be emergent. Very quickly after we had access to the [Microsoft OpenAI] APIs in a secure fashion, we created the chat interface on top of that, which is what we call LenAI.”
It took only a day and a half to deliver the first version of LenAI to a pilot group within the company. The focus on making IT a driver of velocity improvements were responsible for such a fast path. Soon a few hundred people had access to LenAI and within 28 days, the entire firm had access to it. “I think we’ve identified [roughly] 300 distinct use cases that people have been putting this to,” said Beswick. “Some are very specifically related to some small part of the business. Others are more generic. We’ve kept an eye on that, capturing that information, and we’re using that to then drive our build-out agenda for some of the things that are going to be more scalable implementations of this.”
Beswick believes his team has moved farther faster by turning the typical process on its head. Typically, people gather use cases, find a business co-sponsor, build a business case, assemble a project team, and then get started. Given Beswick’s need for speed, that was too slow. “By going the other way and driving something more generic out and flushing the use cases out, I think we’ve got further faster,” said Beswick with pride. As a result, “we added a couple of extra capabilities into the basics, [such as] internet search document upload. We do a lot of work with documents, so there’s lots of stuff people are doing with document summarization, with data extraction from documents and translation between languages, which these tools are good at. Email drafting, particularly for people for whom English is not the first language when we’re a business that largely operates in English [has been another powerful use case]. A lot of people are using it to tighten up their communications and streamline things.”
Code writing is another layer of value. Beswick noted with excitement that different parts of LenAI were written by LenAI. This will increasingly become the norm. Additional functionality that has been defined has included calculators, stock price lookups, weather lookups, database querying, and the ability to pull from a variety of news sources. “There are clearly some use cases where you can see transformation of various processes that we would run through today and would be fairly manual where we can really divert resources into much more high-value-added work,” said Beswick. “Those are starting to spin out. A lot of it’s around things like document ingestion, processing, and data extraction. Cross-mapping data from one data source to another, one data structure to another turns out to be a pretty tractable problem as well. I think we’re just scratching the surface as to what those sorts of things will be.”
Beswick and his team have made substantial progress in a short amount of time, living up to his goal of being a force multiplier. He believes he and his team are setting a sound foundation, but even higher levels of value will be achieved by building upon that foundation.
February 27, 2024
12 p.m. – 3 p.m. EST
Following a year defined by the rise of generative AI, join us virtually on February 27 for our first Digital Symposium of 2024 where global technology influencers and business leaders share progress on their AI journeys, the challenges and opportunities of adopting AI, and the future ahead for digital experiences.
C-level technology leaders, to reserve your spot and stay tuned for agenda updates. We look forward to seeing you!
(Click here for highlights from our most recent Digital Symposium, and stay tuned to our YouTube channel for videos of our panel discussions.)
12:00 – 12:10 p.m.
Welcome and Introductions
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:10 – 12:35 p.m.
Technology, Digital, and Operations Leaders as Drivers of Speed
Jen Felch, Chief Digital Officer & Chief Information Officer, Dell
Mojgan Lefebvre, EVP, Chief Technology & Operations Officer, The Travelers Company
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:35 – 1:00 p.m.
Advancing Digital Capabilities in Non-Digital-Native Organizations
Srini Krishnamurthy, Chief Strategy & Information Officer, FM Global
John Russell, Chief Information Officer, Northrop Grumman
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Partner & East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:00 – 1:15 p.m.
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Codeium
Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder, Codeium
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:15 – 1:40 p.m.
Optimizing Workforce Composition for Digital Maturity
Neelu Sethi, Global Chief Information Officer, Brinks Inc.
Barry Perkins, Chief Operating Officer, Zurich North America
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Partner & Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
1:40 – 2:10 p.m.
Building Resilience Through Technology
Diego Silva, Chief Information Officer, Gates Corp.
Shobie Ramakrishnan, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, GSK
Moderated by Chris Davis, Partner & West Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
2:10 – 2:35 p.m.
Digital as an Enabler of Scale
JP Saini, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Sunbelt Rentals
Jonny LeRoy, Chief Technology Officer, Grainger
Moderated by Steven Norton; Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media; Metis Strategy
2:35 – 2:45 p.m.
Closing Remarks and Adjourn
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
Click here for highlights from our December Digital Symposium, or watch the panels on our YouTube channel. We look forward to seeing you!
It’s been a big year for technology, with the rise of generative AI sparking new conversations about how tech will shape the future of work and society at large. The books below offer a range of perspectives on recent developments in data and AI, as well as resources to help leaders navigate an increasingly complex and fast-moving technology landscape.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, has been a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Bhaskar and he believe the coming decade will bring a diverse selection of intensely capable and fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, they explain how these technologies present an existential dilemma as we work to control them: unregulated use on one side, and overbearing surveillance on the other.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis
Lewis’ latest book tells the psychological story of the dramatic rise and fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest billionaire, who became a leader in crypto almost overnight before losing it all. Lewis tells his story from the vantage point of being in the room to witness the rise and the fall first hand.
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems, by Frances X Frei and Anne Morriss
The informal Facebook motto “move fast and break things” gained a lot of traction across businesses but in a somewhat skewed way. It implied that breaking things, no matter the cost, is simply the price organizations pay for innovation.
Best-selling authors and leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss believe this way of thinking is deeply flawed and hinders leaders from building a truly resilient company. They argue there shouldn’t have to be a tradeoff between speed and excellence, and that companies can solve difficult problems quickly and fix things at the same time. Drawing on work with leading organizations like Uber and ServiceNow, Frei and Morriss identify five key steps, one per each day of the workweek, that leaders can take to solve their organizations’ most complex problems quickly.
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Acemoglu and Johnson revisit a thousand years of history and economics to demonstrate how technological progress doesn’t have to lead to a loss of human empathy. Power and Progress explores how technology was once – and could be again – brought under control and used for the benefit of most people.
All-in On AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence, by Tom Davenport and Nitin Mittal
All-In on AI is an insightful look into the magic behind the success of the technology’s leading adopters. While most companies are placing small bets on AI, a select few are embracing the technology to transform their products, processes, strategies, and customer relationships and experiences. Using examples from organizations including Anthem, Ping An, Airbus, and Capital One, Davenport and Mittal explore what AI looks like at the cutting edge and help organizations understand what’s needed to take AI to the next level.
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li
In her memoir, Stanford professor and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li describes how a Chinese immigrant living in poverty in the United States overcame adversity to become one of the leading contributors to modern artificial intelligence. Whether sharing her own journey or exploring the incredible dangers and opportunities AI poses, she tells a story Reid Hoffman describes as “a testament to the power and possibility of humanity.”
Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team to Reach Their Full Potential and Build a Business that Builds Leaders, by Robert Glazer
Being a leader is a balancing act. Not only must one find and retain top talent, but he or she must also ensure those teams perform at the highest levels and deliver results while avoiding burnout. A follow up to Glazer’s 2019 book, Elevate, this book provides strategies and tools to help leaders unleash their teams’ full potential and build the leaders of tomorrow.
Data Is Everybody’s Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization, by Barbara Wixom, Cynthia Beath, and Leslie Owens
The authors, leaders at MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research and UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, provide a guide to help people across organizations (not just on data teams) think more expansively about how to turn data into money. Covering approaches such as wrapping products with data and selling broader information offerings, show how leaders can drive positive outcomes and generate excitement around new data opportunities.
Think Like a CTO, by Alan Williamson
In this book, Williamson highlights the common themes CTOs should consider as they work to become the trusted leader their company needs. He also adds commentary from industry experts and veteran CTOs to illustrate the book’s focus areas, which include establishing strong relationships with C-suite peers, architecting future-proofed systems, and leading with data rather than passion.
Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification, by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear
Drawing on years of research and insights from organizations such as Amazon, Apple, and NASA, Kim and Spear show how leaders make the “social wiring” that drives results and allows others to thrive. They describe their system for moving problem-solving from risky danger zones to low-risk winning zones and provide a playbook for leaders to rewire their own organizations.
As 2023 quickly comes to a close, here’s a look back at some of the tech stories that caught my eye in the past year. These articles deliver perspectives on the evolution of the technology landscape and the roles of the leaders guiding the way; why overlooking security has disastrous results; and how the rapid evolution of the AI arms race is evolving.
A Timeline of Sam Altman’s Firing from OpenAI – and the Fallout
By Kyle Wiggers, Tech Crunch, November 29
Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, was abruptly fired from his job. It kicked off a frenzied weekend in the tech community as observers tried to piece together what happened at what Altman’s ouster might mean for the future of the company. By the end of the weekend, the company announced plans for Altman’s return, along with a slate of new board members. The drama opened up a broader discussion about how to manage the opportunities and risks posted by AI as startups and tech giants alike race to commercialize it.
Reshaping the Tree: Rebuilding Organizations for AI
By Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, November 27
To explain the future of organizations, Mollick takes us back to the New York and Erie Railroad of 1855, where the need to organize a massive, distributed workforce led to the development of the world’s first org chart. Fast forward to today, and while technology has advanced, many of the challenges leaders face remain the same, namely, how to rebuild companies to adapt to a major shift in how work gets done. This piece offers organizational leaders with a few guiding principles for shaping the future of work in the age of AI.
How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is Powering the AI Revolution
By Stephen Witt, The New Yorker, November 27
Jensen Huang has been leading the way in supercomputing since he signed the paperwork for Nvidia at a San Jose Denny’s in 1993. Today, the chipmaker provides a critical backbone for the AI generative revolution. This piece digs into the company’s history and provides a glimpse at what it has planned for the future, such as unifying the company’s computer graphics and GenAI research, anticipating that more sophisticated image generation and language processing capabilities will enable “digital twins” of the world that can be used to, for example, train robots and self-driving cars.
By Nilay Patel, The Verge, October 24
After 30 years teaching law, the internet policy guru, Lessig, expresses concern about AI and TikTok, and he offers an interesting assessment about how to balance free speech while protecting democracy.
Chinese Spy Agency Rising to Challenge the C.I.A.
By Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes, Muyi Xiao and Chris Buckley, New York Times, December 27
At the tail end of the year, these four Times reporters offer an analysis of the Chinese Ministry of State Security deployment of artificial intelligence among other advanced technology in competition with the United States to achieve Xi Jinping’s goal to become the world’s preeminent economic and military power. The article highlights the intersection of technology, geopolitics, global economics, and military might.
By Stacy Collet, CIO.com, February 28
Amid economic uncertainty and a rapidly evolving technology landscape, today’s technology leaders are mobilizing strategic internal partnerships and taking on the role of both business strategist and changemaker as they transform the way their organization’s drive business outcomes. CIOs must still manage core technology, to be sure, but today “…it’s more about how we drive customer expansion, how we improve margin expansion, reduce friction by improving overall productivity of the organizations, and how each of these ties into our business strategy priorities,” says Max Chan, CIO of Avnet. CIOs “need to understand all those. We need to take interest in every single strategy priority in the business. This is table stakes.”
The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story
By Andy Greenberg, Wired, November 14
This article takes us behind the scenes how a bored 19-year and his friends dove into the world of cybercrime, creating a network that would be used in the major DDoS attack that took down major swaths of the internet, including notable sites like the New York Times, Netflix, Twitter (now “X”), and PayPal.
How to Train Generative AI Using Your Company’s Data
By Tom Davenport and Maryam Alavi, Harvard Business Review, July 6
In the summer of 2023, technology leaders raced to figure out the best ways to bring generative AI capabilities to their organizations. This article outlined a variety of approaches for applying genAI to internal knowledge management capabilities, highlighting projects by Bloomberg, Google and Morgan Stanley.
Google: “We have no Moat, and Neither does OpenAI”
By Dylan Patel and Afzal Ahmad, SemiAnalysis, May 4
A leaked memo from a Google researcher-made waves this summer in its assertion that the tech giant didn’t have the right stuff to win in the AI arms race. The memo stated that open-source models “are lapping us,” and encouraged the company to establish itself as a leader in the open-source community and create new paths to innovation.
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Explained: What You Need to Know
By Amanda Hetler, Tech Target, April 20
On March 10 Silicon Valley Bank was seized by state regulators due to its inability to pay its depositors, marking the biggest bank failure since Washington Mutual in 2008. Its downfall had a big impact on tech companies large and small that depended on the bank’s services and raised broader questions about the stability of the financial system.