The 2023 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium took place on May 15 and 16 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, overlooking the Charles River, and a short walk from the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. Livestream tickets were also offered to help better engage the Symposium’s worldwide audience.
This year’s overall theme was “Driving Digital Resilience in a Turbulent World.” It was a very appropriate theme given that business and economies are still bouncing back from the major disruptions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to understand and adapt to transformative technology advances like Generative AI, and coping with the rising volume of cybersecurity threats in an increasingly dangerous world.
2023 marked the 20th anniversary of the MIT CIO Symposium. I’ve been involved with the MIT Symposium for most of those 20 years, having first participated in the 2009 Symposium where I moderated a panel on The Virtual Organization. In those earlier years, CIOs and other senior business executives from around the world came to MIT to explore how leading-edge academic research on information technologies could help address the challenges faced by their companies in the 21st century, Internet-based digital economy.
A recurring theme since those early years has been the evolving role of the CIO. In the past, the primary responsibility of CIOs was operating their companies’ IT infrastructures while keeping costs down. Given their operational role, they often reported to the COO or the CFO of their organization. But that started to change in recent years. Increasingly, CIOs have been given responsibility for their companies’ overall digital strategy, working closely with senior executives across the business. Almost all report to or interact with their CEOs regularly. Many have already been exploiting cloud, automation, big data and analytics, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. Given the continuing pace of technology advances, their digital transformation roles are likely to continue to expand over the coming years.
A major Symposium tradition has been the CIO Leadership Award, which honors CIOs “who lead their organizations by delivering business value and innovative use of IT in exceptional ways.” The award draws applicants from a variety of industries and countries. The judging process involves three phases. First, an initial screening of the applications selects around 10 semifinalists. Next, a team of judges, including past award winners and finalists, selects between 3 and 5 finalists. In the final phase, a small group of MIT-affiliated judges interviews each finalist and selects the overall winner.
For the past ten years, I’ve been one of the final stage judges. I can attest that this is both a very exciting and frustrating task, - exciting because each of the finalists is so good; and frustrating because we have to select a winner from among such accomplished CIOs. This year, Tom Peck, EVP, CIO and CDO of Sysco, was the winner of the 2023 CIO Leadership Award; and Oğuz Sezgin, CIO and Digital Transformation Leader of Koç Holdings; and Deepa Soni, EVP and CIO of The Hartford were our two other, very accomplished finalists.
In an interview conducted prior to the 2023 event, Executive Chair Allan Tate explained the major changes the Symposium has gone through to better reflect the evolution of the CIO’s role over the past 20 years. In the earlier years, the Symposium was more of an academic conference exploring the technology and business changes brought about by advances in IT and in the fast growing Internet-based digital economy.
When Tate became executive chair in 2020, he had to make considerable changes “in part because we were forced to adapt to COVID-19 like everybody else. One of the things I did is I expanded the range of academics we brought in, so we now involve departments across MIT.” He also increased the participation of previous CIO winners and finalists. “They act as award judges, but they're also coming back now to moderate panels.”
Tate was then asked about this year’s Symposium theme, “Driving Digital Resilience in a Turbulent World.” What does the theme encompass? “We’re trying to highlight the role of technology, innovation and leadership in creating a resilient and agile organization,” said Tate. “Cybersecurity and privacy are front and center. … How do organizations cultivate agility and innovation? How do they foster data-driven decision making? … What’s the strategy for keeping people on board and motivated?”
He added that CIOs are now telling us that there’s so much digital technology that they're having to figure out how these various technologies can best complement one another and integrate with their existing legacy technologies? It’s become a kind of highly complex system problem.
Finally, Tate was asked if there’s an overarching strategy that can help IT leaders drive resilience? “Yes, I think there is,” he replied. “The strategy needs to be holistic; by that, I mean that it needs to encompass technology, processes, people and culture. In the past few decades, the major reason why we embraced new technologies was efficiency and productivity. Resilience was this back-burner issue for many companies. But times are changing. The world is more turbulent; it’s more uncertain. We got pandemics, we got cybersecurity incidents, we got supply chain disruptions, and on and on. Creating a culture of resilience is more important now than it’s ever been, and it’s become a focal point for CIOs.”
In another interview, Tom Peck, the winner of this year’s CIO Leadership Award, was asked to comment on the most important ways top IT leadership roles have changed? “We’ve been talking about the evolution of the CIO role for years, if not decades,” he said. “What's happened is, more recently, that transformation has accelerated the need to change. Technology is so pervasive today. Companies are run on digital technologies. Traditional companies are now digital companies, even within Sysco. Our trucks, our warehouses, our sales tools — it’s all digital and automated.” Technology is now assumed to be table stakes.
“But more than ever, we’re business leaders first. We’re a ‘well-rounded athlete.’ You need to be the CEO’s trusted adviser. You're sitting at the intersection of people and process to drive the transformation, to drive the innovation. We’re also focused on risk management, resilience, governance, portfolio management and making sure we’re spending in the right areas. It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader and have a great view of what’s going on around the company.”
At this year’s Symposium I moderated a panel on Digital Enterprise: Augmenting Digital with AI + ML + Web3. My aim was to discuss the impact of major technology advances over the next three to five years. When first planning the panel last Fall I thought that the impact of Web3 on the Internet and the digital economy would be the major focus of our discussions. But on November 30 OpenAI released ChatGPT, and ever since, Generative AI, Large Language Models, and conversational chatbots have pretty much dominated most technology discussions.
Prior to the panel, I conducted an interview with Gordon Haff, a technologist I’ve long known, where I previewed what we planned to discuss at the panel later that afternoon. “Everyone was talking about AI to a greater or lesser degree,” wrote Haff as he introduced the interview. “If I were to summarize the overall attitude towards AI at the event, it was something like: really interesting, really early, and we’re mostly just starting to figure out the best ways to get business value from it,” a summary which nicely captures my own feelings about generative AI and related technologies.
“There’s no question in my mind that what’s happening with AI now is the most exciting transformative technology since the internet,” I said. “But it will take a lot of additional investments, applications, and lots and lots of [other] stuff.” The major impact of Gen AI will probably not be seen overnight. “It’s very important to realize that many things will take years of development if not decades. I’m really excited about the generative AI opportunity but [the technology is] only a few years old.”
I expressed my opinion that so called Generative AI hallucinations, — where the AI systems comes up with sentences and information that sound plausible and authoritative but make no sense whatsoever, — have nothing to do with intelligence of emergent behaviors, but rather, they should be considered a bug, as is the case with other system and software bugs. I concluded the interview by adding that “We shouldn’t stop research on this stuff because it’s the only way to make it better,” as we have done with the Internet, and other highly complex and widely used technologies. “It’s super complex engineering but, in the end, it’s engineering.”
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