Show Notes
CIOs are accountable for AI results but often not in control of how AI is actually used across the business. Andy Baldwin, Senior Vice President of Consulting Offerings and Growth at IBM Consulting, explains how CIOs regain visibility and control as AI moves from small pilots to industrial scale.
He describes the real cost of scaling AI, right-sizing models to cut token cost, governance and observability, cyber and post-quantum risk at the board level, workforce reskilling, and modernizing legacy systems without breaking them.
====== This episode brought to you by Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo™: https://cxo.news/KGg8XY ======
YOU’LL DISCOVER
✅ Why two-thirds of CIOs are accountable for AI but not in full control of how it is used ✅ How IBM runs its own AI program (Client 0) and tracks 60 different models on a single observability layer ✅ Why right-sizing models beats defaulting to an expensive frontier model, the Ferrari-to-the-corner-shop problem that drives token cost ✅ How one AI deployment ran to a $25 million compute cost in six months, then was re-architected down to roughly $2 million ✅ Why AI adoption is a contact sport, not a technology you throw over the fence and hope gets used ✅ Why cyber threats and the post-quantum encryption risk have moved up to the board level ✅ How IBM is reskilling 15,000 to 20,000 people whose skills face declining demand ✅ How to modernize legacy by preserving the system of record while reimagining the engagement layer
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 The CIO accountability gap 3:31 Why AI adoption is a contact sport 9:18 Democratization forces a governance rethink 10:31 The real cost of scaling AI 17:01 Writing controls versus enforcing them 19:32 When AI becomes the business model 29:49 From efficiency to reinventing the business 36:07 Quantum and cyber reach the boardroom 41:33 Soft landing or jobs apocalypse 46:59 Proving control and successful pilots 49:54 Modernizing legacy without breaking it 53:06 Accountability and the CIO’s next move
Subscribe for weekly conversations with the business and technology leaders shaping the enterprise.
Get the CXOTalk newsletter: https://newsletter.cxotalk.com
Show notes, transcript, and summary: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/ibm-consulting-cios-new-agenda-for-ai
Episode 924
#CXOTalk #EnterpriseAI #CIO #AIGovernance #AgenticAI #IBM #DigitalTransformation #AIStrategy #AILeadership
More from CXOTalk
Check out Gartner Symposium: https://cxo.news/KGg8XY === Tamar Yehoshua is Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian, where AI agents are now direct users of the software her team builds. She led product at Google Search and Slack before joining Atlassian, and in this conversation she explains how the company designs products for both people and agents: the teamwork graph that gives an agent the organizational context it arrives without, who stays accountable when a chain of agents goes wrong, how Atlassian measures AI spending with its CFO, and why she never believed agents would kill SaaS.
Check out Gartner Symposium: https://cxo.news/KGg8XY ======== More than 90% of the code at Snap is now written by AI agents, and a code review agent checks most of it within ten minutes. Saral Jain, SVP, Head of Engineering and CIO at Snap Inc., built the system that makes that safe for nearly a billion monthly users. He explains the golden path of 14 managed agents, the guardrails that account for more than half of the investment, and why accountability still rests with a named human for every change that ships.
Enterprise AI has moved past experimentation and now has to prove its return. Ed Sim, Founder and General Partner of boldstart ventures, ranked the No. 1 seed investor in the Business Insider Seed 100 two years running, sees hundreds of AI startup pitches a year, and writes the first check into companies enterprises buy from years later. He wrote the first check into Snyk and backed Protect AI, which Palo Alto Networks acquired for more than $700 million.
Most enterprise AI pilots stall or fail before production, and the blocker is rarely the model.
Are AI agents ready for banking and financial services? Former UBS Group CIO Oliver Bussmann explains the risks to trust and reputation in banking.