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Insights from the October 2025 Metis Strategy Summit in New York City
The conversation at the latest Metis Strategy’s Summit reflected both urgency and optimism around AI. Senior technology and digital executives from across industries compared playbooks for turning AI ambition into measurable enterprise outcomes while balancing innovation, accountability, and trust. The conversations also underscored the increasing need for technology leaders to be educators, change managers and ecosystem builders as their organizations navigate a period of rapid transformation.
Leaders agreed that proving AI’s value requires shared ownership of results across business, technology, and finance. GSK Chief Digital and Technology Officer Shobie Ramakrishnan described an enterprise framework built around “fluency, diffusion, and outcomes.” Technology and finance teams jointly define AI metrics tied to strategic priorities, while growing engagement with GSK’s internal AI assistant signals rising fluency across the organization.
At Avery Dennison, CIO Nick Colisto has extended the company’s long-standing value-measurement discipline to AI. Finance and IT review projects after launch to confirm benefits delivered, and Colisto’s team tracks how many of the company’s annual initiatives incorporate AI to understand where the technology is creating measurable impact.
Participants emphasized that scaling AI depends less on models than on mindset and a commitment to bringing teams along. Guy Peri, Chief Information and Digital Officer at McCormick & Co., said success comes from investing as much in people as in platforms. His teams focus on meeting employees where they are: clarifying why transformation matters, what it means for them, and how the company will support them through training.
In asset-heavy industries, credibility often starts on the ground. Anil Bhatt, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Norfolk Southern, embedded data scientists in rail yards to understand frontline challenges before deploying an AI-driven transportation platform that predicts maintenance needs and improves safety. That proximity built trust and helped AI evolve into a core operational capability.
Product thinking is helping organizations link technology investment directly to financial performance. At Cushman & Wakefield, Chief Digital and Information Officer Sal Companieh shifted to a model in which technology funding originates from the business. The approach makes investment priorities and trade-offs transparent to both product and finance leaders, driving accountability around measurable value.
Diane Schwarz, Group CIO at Smurfit WestRock, cautioned that functions mature at different speeds. Her team contextualizes spending in business terms—asking, for instance, “How many boxes do we need to sell to fund this initiative?”—to ground transformation in economic reality and sustain momentum across varying levels of readiness.
As AI becomes embedded in critical operations, leaders are designing for resilience across both technology and talent. David Burns, CIO at GE Aerospace, shared how the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which took place hours before an earnings call with the CEO, was a “wake up moment” that prompted GE to re-examine vendor oversight and resilience and improve existing processes. Resilience is no longer a recovery exercise but a design principle.
On the workforce side, Jennifer Charters, CIO at Lincoln Financial, emphasized that sustainable change depends on behavior change, not just tools. Her team uses a “habit loop” approach — cue, craving, response, reward — to help employees form new digital routines supported by training and incentives.
Looking ahead, Prasanna Gopalakrishnan, Global Chief Product and AI Officer at ADP, expects leaders will manage mixed teams of human and digital employees. Building trust with these hybrid workforces will be key to driving adoption and performance.
The modern CIO is evolving from operator to ecosystem builder, one who enables collaboration, removes friction, and ensures technology strategy is inseparable from business strategy. Mojgan Lefebvre, Chief Technology and Operations Officer at Travelers, noted the importance of both educating and empowering individuals across the enterprise to leverage AI responsibly, while at the same time emphasizing the importance of human judgment in decision making.
At Breakthru Beverage, CIO Glenn Remoreras focused on educating executives and other leaders early, helping them learn the art of the possible instead of immediately defining use cases. This top-down literacy created alignment and enthusiasm for reimagining business processes with AI. Pawan Verma, Chief Data and Information Officer at Cencora, echoed that impact, noting the need for CIOs to help leaders distinguish between what is hype and what is truly transformational.
While many discussions focused on execution, Nugi Jakobishvili, Chief Investment Officer at ICONIQ, reminded attendees that long-term value creation in AI will hinge on fundamentals, not hype. He noted that as AI becomes ubiquitous, advantage shifts toward those controlling scarce resources: power, proprietary data, and the expertise to integrate them.
Across conversations, leaders converged on a clear truth: sustained impact comes from the fusion of human judgment and technological ambition. Success depends on connecting AI investments to real business outcomes, scaling through trust and change, and building resilient systems and cultures that can learn and adapt continuously. Technology may set the pace, but leadership determines the outcome.
