Orchestrating the Tech C-Suite Reset for the AI Era

Speaker A: Welcome to techfluential, a podcast series hosted by custom content from WSJ and Deloitte. This is our season one finale, and today we're doing something a little different. We're stepping back to revisit some of the most impactful ideas from across the season to reflect on the thought leadership delivered by our wide variety of guests and talk about how the themes and issues discussed help create a blueprint not just for technology leaders, but for leaders across the enterprise and into the boardroom as well. I'm Brian Kimenetsky, joined by Ludi Lorenzo, and for this finale, Anjuli Shaikh, who leads the global and US CIO programs at Deloitte.

Speaker B: Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks, Brian.

Speaker A: Anjali, I know you've been following this season. What have been some of the most impactful themes in your mind?

Speaker B: I think for me, really, the first part is that technology really isn't the hard part. It's everything around it, whether it's the operating model, the decision making, the leadership, the talent, how the work actually gets done. Second, that the CIO role has really shifted from supporting the business to really shaping it. And it's no longer a functional conversation, it's an enterprise one. And finally, I think we couldn't get away, as hard as we may have tried in some instances, around the conversation on AI. While it's evolved quickly, the fundamentals and the expectations of technology leadership really haven't changed as much as people think. If anything, they've become increasingly more important.

Speaker A: Let's start with your first point, Anjali. That technology isn't the hard part, it's everything around it. This is one of the core themes we heard all season, including in Episode nine from Liz Santoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco.

Speaker B: The technology is the easy part. Redesigning workflows, who owns what, what gets eliminated, what gets rebuilt. That's the real work. I don't think most organizations are really ready for it because it's not built into the scope of an AI project.

Speaker A: Anjali, what do you think? Leaders are still underestimating about what it takes to scale AI, uh, and drive meaningful transformation.

Speaker B: So technology itself is rarely the limiting factor. It's around the workflows, how decisions get made, and how organization is actually set up to absorb that change. And so if you don't fundamentally address that, the technology will not fully be a value accelerator. It's going to stay at the level of kind of the pilots or the experimentation in order to scale at that transformational level. There are some decisions that need to be made around people process and where the direction of the business is really headed.

Speaker A: Lou, what is the difference between, as Anjali says, those companies that do seem to find that path and those that are struggling with it?

Speaker C: Yeah, if I were to think like, what is the real essence of the difference? It's a sincere understanding that technology itself does not create value. It's this idea that someone needs to show up every day doing something differently than they did it before. And as Anjali calls out this understanding of the outcomes and working backwards from that, it's getting through this idea of change management versus adoption.

Speaker A: Anjali, especially from a, uh, people and leadership perspective, what makes AI transformation fundamentally different from previous waves of technology change?

Speaker B: In today's era of this AI mandate, I don't think we're asking people and leaders to learn a new tool. We're really asking them to rethink the way that the entire organization is thinking about the integration between technology and business, which is an unprecedented shift. So it is going to require unlearning habits, undoing or reimagining processes that have been reinforced maybe over decades in some instances. And the point that I think some of our guests continue to come back to is this is not a one time effort. It's gonna be a sustained requirement. And I think we're gonna find that that's the difficulty.

Speaker C: And I think what I'd add to Anjali's comments is there's a certain humanity to how this shows up when there's a significant fundamental change in doing something that you have been recognized for being very good at. And certainly for some of the technologies that we've been talking about, AI being top of the list can be personally just challenging to navigate. And so I think this idea of leading with empathy and I think this idea of helping individuals see progress, recognize progress, so that they continue to be engaged in a very productive and thoughtful way, I think is important.

Speaker A: The question of what technology leadership looks like was a common theme throughout the season. In Episode four, John Marconti, former CIO at Vanguard and currently the US CIO in Residence at Deloitte, noted that the traditional job descriptions for technology leaders are changing. As tech leaders, we don't get a pass at being technical. We have to be technical, but we also have to be passionate about our business. We have to be entrepreneurial leaders. We have to be people who empower, cross functional teams to deliver outcomes. At the end and in the heart of that, if we do that right, then we will engender this Culture of innovation. Lou, when you step back across these conversations, what's actually changing about how technology leaders operate inside the enterprise?

Speaker C: I think it's a fundamental recognition that, number one, there's not a dollar of revenue that goes through any corporation that doesn't rely on technology. And that every company, more or less, is a technology company, whether they sell it or use it. And I think you're seeing leadership teams come to the conclusion, rightly so, that this isn't somebody else's job. This is how we run the business. This is how we drive competitive advantage. And I think you're seeing, uh, everyone sit in their chair a little bit differently. And in some cases that may be a little uncomfortable. I mean, it's a different muscle. And that's where we've talked a little bit about this notion of being bilingual. And that's really the catalyst for that, is that opportunity, but also that need to make good on those investments and to make sure that we're focused on value.

Speaker A: That idea of being bilingual, of speaking both the language of technology and of the business, was a key theme in episode one with Ashley Pettit, the former senior vice president, president and CIO at State Farm Insurance. She noted the criticality of that skill in a very personal way.

Speaker B: If I have a regret or a do over, one of them would be learning to really speak in the language of business sooner in my career. You have to really change your communication. Talk to business partners, business leaders, in terms of what they care about, ask questions to understand how they are measuring success.

Speaker A: Anjali, how do you view that challenge of technology leaders being able to speak multiple languages across the business?

Speaker B: I think to Lou's point, what we're seeing and what's played out across a number of our conversations is that we're seeing a more integrated leadership model where these decisions are being made a lot more collectively. And technology is part of that conversation from the beginning. So to the point around bilingual, I think it's a foundational idea of how the cio, the technology leader within an organization, needs to show up. But what we've explored is also, that's also true for every other functional leader across the C suite, because it's not just about translating technology and the business anymore, it's about co owning those outcomes. And so bilingualism is foundational to every part of the role, whether you're the cfo, the cio, a board member. And I think we're going to start seeing a very different posture than we've seen historically around what the expectations, both from a Business lens, as well as a technology lens ends up being for many C suite leaders, around the technology agenda at, uh, scale to the point

Speaker A: that the jobs themselves are changing. For example, in episode seven, we spoke with Tracy Franklin. She serves as Chief People and Digital Technology Officer at AH Moderna, a role that was created to reflect the new intersections of technology and business. So, Lou, how do you view this redefining of roles?

Speaker C: There isn't one answer, and I think that will continue to be the case. As you called out new roles, new titles, new perspectives. I think that's going to be critically important, not just around industry specifics and sector specifics and insights and different business models, but those executives that know how to get the most out of number one. What am I building? What am I using? Am I using the right things in the right way? And am I equipping my organization to be effective at using it? And so to me, those are the things, macro things to be focused on so the mission doesn't change. But certainly the way that an individual leader shows up and motivates teams and educates them and helps them see the bigger picture while not missing the things that are right in front of them, I think you'll continue to see that.

Speaker A: I want to turn now to talent and how technology is rapidly changing the workforce. In episode eight, Gab Ricci, Chief Data and Technology Officer at Takeda, did a wonderful job articulating this issue. One thing leadership often overlook is the workforce reality we are heading to very soon. We'll have five generations working side by side with very different expectations about how work gets done. And I think it's our responsibility to smooth over those differences, is to really enable each generation to perform at its best. And that means reimagining how work and collaboration happens. Knowing that agentic AI will shape roles as leaders, we have the responsibility, I think, to bring an AI native generation into the enterprise and give them a, uh, real run through the company. Uh, we've talked about new skills and fundamentally rethinking how work gets done. So, Lou, when you connect Gab's perspective with others that we've heard throughout the season, what do you think is actually changing about the workforce and the operating model?

Speaker C: I think one of the things that has jumped out for me is the need to be comfortable with ever increasing levels of velocity, the pace of change, the pace of innovation, the pace of invention, the need for experimentation, the ability to learn, incorporate, try again. And so this need to experiment thoughtfully, carefully innovate, learn, and move on from mistakes and move on from learnings is really important and that's really hard to do. It's really hard to be comfortable with a level of ambiguity to make decisions and try things with maybe a different level of precision than we'd operated in the past.

Speaker B: I think what we're seeing is AI is starting to especially do at the entry levels is remove some of that repetition. Tasks that used to be foundational to how you build learning is now being automated or augmented. So really that question becomes how are you going to build experience and where is that going to come from going forward? I think skills, learning, culture all go hand in hand. And Brian, to your question. I think the talent equation of all of our conversations is really going to be the mechanism in terms of outcomes and success of the next generation of leaders. Otherwise you start creating organizations that are highly enabled by technology and AI, but you don't have really this talent or workforce to decipher between judgment and use it effectively and think about mission and values and culture that are so critical to how organizations run.

Speaker A: You mentioned culture, Anjali and changing technologies and changing workforces require reexamination of culture as well and how leaders establish it. Katie Graham Shannon Global head of the Digital and Technology Officers Practice at Heidrican Struggles discussed this in episode seven.

Speaker B: We used to talk about a, uh, culture fit and we purposefully changed the wording to culture impact. Culture fit is a moment in time. Culture impact is embracing the fact that you're going to go from A to B quite fast and you're going to iterate along the way and it's not going to feel perfect.

Speaker A: So what does it take organizationally and culturally to help people adapt continuously instead of treating transformation like a one time event?

Speaker C: It's about curiosity, asking good questions and being willing and excited to learn. Having that growth mindset which is not something to take for granted. I mean that is not easy to do regardless of what you do today, how long you've been doing it. I mean that growth mindset that requires investment and it requires an investment from the organization but also more importantly from the person, both in terms of time, but I would also say emotional investment. And from a structural or operating model perspective, we're seeing more and more teams operate in a product operating model because this is effectively what it's designed to do to get these pods or cross functional teams or cross discipline teams that are focused on a, um, part of the business in that way that is either something that a customer buys or it's part of the value chain, not so much an organizational Department, if you will, but it's really working backwards for the market.

Speaker A: So you can't talk about the promise and potential benefits of AI without discussing risk. And in episode five, we spoke with Jamil Farshi, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Equifax. He spoke about the ways in which technology and security need not work in opposition to each other. Look, innovation and risk, they're not mutually exclusive, period. If you overlay compliance and things like that, does it make innovation a little bit more difficult? Sure, but it just means that we. We need to be a little bit smarter about how we lay this stuff out. I've heard throughout my career that, hey, all of these things that you're forcing us to do, Jamil, are slowing us down or they're impossible or whatever it might be. But now that I'm in the technology seat, when you actually drive those things, you see accelerated innovation and you see a lot of the barriers immediately melting away. Lou, how should leaders approach this question of risk and value, especially around AI?

Speaker C: Uh, you know, every organization as well as every industry, regulated or otherwise, will have their own answer to that, but it absolutely needs to be part of the calculus. What can go wrong? What are we comfortable dealing with? What's the likelihood that it's going to happen? What happens if it does? And what's our level of discomfort with that? And that's, by the way, those are conversations that they have generally in every other part of their business when they're launching new products or when they're moving into new markets or they're taking on new customers, working with other suppliers. And so reinforcing the idea that this is a business conversation, I think you're gonna see more and more investment put alongside the adoption, the platforms themselves, because that's how you make sure that you get the benefit, but you protect yourself from the downside.

Speaker A: So there's one more topic I'd like to cover. All of our leaders talked about how technology ought to be applied inside the organization and the need for clear purpose in each application. But Moderna's Tracy Franklin also noted something that I think gets to the core of what technology should drive inside the Enterpr.

Speaker B: People get excited about innovation. They want to redefine work. People want to play around with AI and experiment and apply it to getting work done and go, wow, I'm doing something really cool at this company, and I'm in control of the destination in terms of where I can have impact in my role.

Speaker A: Anjuli, what separates organizations that use AI to improve efficiency from those that, uh, use it to truly transform how people work.

Speaker B: This was one of the most important shifts that we saw across the season. If AI only shows up as a productivity story, we've heard it's not going to stick. When people feel like they're doing something new, something more impactful, something they couldn't do before, that's where the adoption actually happens. We have to really start with a real problem and deliver value. I think when it starts to feel like something that people can buy into, when you get a bit more of the why or the mission alignment, you're going to get more of that stickiness of people getting, getting excited about the innovation and the things that they really want to do with AI and experiment and drive value because they're passionate about it.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. And to me, this is actually the essence of leadership, technology or otherwise. When I think of the role of a leader in an organization, it's to paint a vision. Where are we going? Why is it interesting? How do we know if we're going to be good at it over time kind of thing. And leaders give people a reason to try every day. And so in the context of technology, the way that, as Anjali referenced it, it's about translating to everyone on the team what matters and how are they contributing to it. And to the extent that that is focused on efficiency or throughput or activity, that's helpful but insufficient because people want to feel meaning in what they contributed to. And that's how you get to adoption. That's how you start to close gaps, especially when the ground is shifting underneath you as, as it continues to in this space.

Speaker A: So as we wrap, uh, to pull the curtain back a little bit for people who've been following along throughout the first season, every episode we ask Lou to define what it means to be techfluential and why it matters. And every episode, Lou doesn't, uh, like doing it. And so what I would like to do now, as a gift to Lou, is ask Lou to ask Anjali to ask what it means to be techfluential and why it matters. Lou, Go ahead, Anjali.

Speaker C: As you know, the name of the program is techfluential. And at the end of every episode, we ask our guests to answer a simple question. What does techfluential mean to you?

Speaker B: All of the responses we got to that question were so different, but they all pointed to the same thing, that it's not about the technology at all. It's about how leaders can understand the technology to reshape really how the business operates, how teams deliver, how processes are reimagined, and it's truly going to be a, uh, pivotal moment for leaders, no matter what their roles are, between implementing technology and how they're able to change fundamentally how the organization operates and the impact that it delivers. And when I say the impact that it delivers, it's aligned to their mission, their customers, and their talent. Did I do an okay job?

Speaker C: You did a great job. Want to just say thank you to all of our amazing guests that invested, but more importantly, saw this as a real moment for them to lend their voice to some important conversations and to get back to the profession and frankly, to help spur some dialogue with the rest of the executive leadership around the criticality of technology to serving their customers better and driving competitive advantage.

Speaker A: And that's a great place to end things. Thanks Lou and Anjali for helping pull together the themes from these conversations. And thanks to our guests as well. And of course, to all of you who have listened to TechFlow this season.

Speaker B: The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte. This podcast provides general and educational information only and is not intended to constitute advice or services of any kind. For additional information about Deloitte, go to deloitte.com us about the information contained in this podcast is for informational purposes only. This content was created by custom content from WSJ, a unit of the Wall Street Journal advertising department.

Speaker A: It.