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What you’ll learn:
- CIOs need to be business leaders who can offer a vision for what’s possible.
- Tech execs should be highly intentional in adopting agentic AI.
- Innovation should happen in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
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What does it take to lead successfully during an era of turbocharged change?
Senior technology officers from Ferrovial, Liberty Mutual, and MetLife recently shared their advice.
The executives, all finalists for the MIT Sloan 2025 CIO Leadership Award, appeared on a panel moderated by MIT Sloan’s , a senior lecturer and founder of the Global Opportunity Forum.
Westerman noted that there’s a lot of hype around AI, but it’s “not nearly as easy we thought it was,” even for the brightest minds in the business.
“In fact, I keep hearing things like ‘That low-hanging fruit is really not so low’ or ‘It’s great in the lab, it’s great on the bench, but it’s hard to take it to scale.’”
Here are three pieces of wisdom from the three leaders.
1. Don’t just execute on tech — shape company strategy.
CIOs need to be business leaders who can shape strategy and offer a vision for what’s possible while still being grounded in reality.
In 2023, when Liberty Mutual embarked on a large IT transformation, Monica Caldas, the company’s executive vice president and global CIO, didn’t view the move as a siloed operation. She wanted all business partners to be aligned and to have an understanding of why the changes were taking place.
“That transformation could have been an IT thing — ‘Let's just do it in our own function’ — but the reality is, it’s not possible to transform without the [organization] actually going on that journey with you,” said Caldas, who was subsequently named the winner of the CIO Leadership Award.
2. Lay the groundwork now for the era of agentic AI.
Agentic AI is a type of artificial intelligence designed to run autonomously; it makes decisions and takes actions with minimal human oversight. Dimitris Bountolos, the CIO and innovation officer for infrastructure operator Ferrovial, said that information executives need to be highly intentional about how they integrate agentic AI into their organizations.
“We believe this is something that is going to redefine the way teams, human beings, [and] organizations are interacting with each other,” Bountolos said, adding that it’s important to train agents with the right information.
Caldas advised treating agents as if they were human employees, especially in terms of training, risk management, and access controls — “everything that goes with what an employee would have.”
MetLife’s Bill Pappas recommended that, whether companies are rolling out agents or AI more broadly, executives should pause to take a hard look at their legacy infrastructure and data so that they can effectively capitalize on the new technology. “Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to utilize all of this,” said Pappas, executive vice president of MetLife’s global technology and operations.
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3. Innovate at three speeds.
Bountolos said that he thinks about innovation in three layers — incremental, exponential, and transformational — all of which need to be working simultaneously at all levels of an organization.
“We need, in our teams, shakers and dreamers but also doers and people who are very attached to incrementally improving our daily activities,” he said.
Bringing innovation into daily activities and paving the road toward future objectives can help companies “convey the best of what they have — the best of their legacy, and the best of their future dreams,” Bountolos said.
George Westerman is a pioneering researcher on digital transformation whose work bridges the fields of executive leadership and technology strategy. Westerman is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and founder of the Global Opportunity Forum. He is also co-chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award, which recognizes chief information officers who lead their organizations to deliver exemplary levels of business value through the innovative use of information technology.
