Martin Faigelbaum, IT & Connected Technology Regional Director at Toyota; Renata Fontana, Global CIO of Arcor Group and Martín Giammatteo, Digital Domain Sponsor and IT Director of Farmacity, were part of one of the panels at the latest Forbes CIO Summit, and exchanged ideas — moderated by Forbes editor Pablo Wahnon — on the new challenges that arise in the AI era.
How do you evaluate the role of the CIO in this new world?” Wahnon asked to start the exchange. “The role of the CIO began to change,” acknowledged Faigelbaum, from Toyota. “Before, it was the only person who knew about technology, who had the knowledge. It went from being the monopolizer of technology to being an enabler. Today, anyone who enters the organization has a strong technology background from their own use. Our role now is to put things on track so that they can be carried out in each of the areas according to the established parameters.”
Fontana, from the Arcor group, added: “CIOs are increasingly partners with the business, with the purchasing manager, with the finance manager, with all the managers; and we have to be able to understand that we are also a bridge between technology and the different areas of the company. Ideas come up very easily, but then we have to accompany the business teams to evaluate what real value these changes will bring. Asking the necessary questions to see if this is viable — says Fontana -. These empathy and communication skills, which are interpersonal, are now enabling within the organization. It is a much more complex role.”
From monitoring a platform, seeing the world in bits and bytes and “speaking in difficult terms” to being an essential part of the business; to sitting at the board table, building solutions with them, as illustrated by Giammatteo, from Farmacity. “And not only at the board table, but at each of the tables of the different management teams, providing knowledge and being the link between technology and business,” adds the executive. Because the new role of the CIO, in other words, is transversal to the company’s objective.
“At the board table we are all business executives who want the best for the company, and each one contributes his specialty, which is what he knows best,” says Faiglebaum. “But that does not monopolize knowledge in any case, because the finance person also talks about purchasing and the purchasing person talks about technology. Everyone can talk about the topics and that is how networking is generated.”
For Fontana, innovation comes from everywhere. “The difference is that in many areas of the organization, a partner is needed to carry it forward. That is why we are partners between what the business area wants to do and what we have as solution platforms. It is, in a way, about building technological and methodological capabilities within the IT area to support this innovation. There are ideas that come from the IT area and, in other cases, from the business area.”
Giammatteo adds: “Also, being able to answer why we want to do it and what we want to achieve with it.” Ultimately, what is the value that this innovation will bring to the business.
Returning to the point of how innovation arises, Toyota says that before, the technology manager would meet with a supplier who wanted to present something new and, in a second step, that innovation was taken to the business for evaluation. “Today — Faigelbaum insists — there are things that reach people and the end consumer before they come to present it to me, as happened with the GPT chat. When we talk about image verification, for example, which we use for our industrial plants, to see specifications of our vehicles, we already had it available on our cell phones and we put it to use.”
Innovation has become democratized, says Faigelbaum, and “we are no longer the technology leaders, the ones who monopolize knowledge, but we have to democratize, with control and security.”
However, Fontana points out, there is a fine line between chaos and governance. “There is a fine line between autonomy and chaos, and you have to be very creative,” they say at Arcor. “There is no recipe that works for everyone and you have to find the way for it to flow and end up adding value to the company.”
On the other hand, says the specialist, the technological platform of the organization must be at another level. “There are things that are projects for specific areas, but then the organization’s operating system must be, to put it simply, up to date with the times. If you have an operating system that is not updated, an obsolete integration architecture, in the end all these innovation processes remain as isolated things that do not improve the organization’s results.”
What is happening with generative AI in companies?
“We are already experimenting with AI in terms of customer service,” Faigelbaum says. “We evaluate the responses we give to customers, for example, in the call center. We make a record of all the conversations and then we see how that customer arrived and how satisfied they left. A quality assessment,” he explains. “We also interpret images in the case of having to evaluate licenses. We run them through AI for interpretation, but there are times when AI doesn’t understand, or it fabricates. I think it needs to evolve even more to be completely autonomous. But it’s only a matter of time.”
Giammatteo adds: “I think that the internal use of AI, with the copilot, requires preparing the entire security aspect, because if the documents are not well segmented, well tagged, then there is a risk, since anyone can access documentation that may be confidential.”
Fontana suggests that there is a lot of talk these days about automation. “There is a lot of talk about greater productivity associated with AI, but the truth is that organisations are in the process of making that a reality,” he concludes.
