How The CIO Closes The Loop Between Business And Customer

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On one hand, the future of AI is bright. Every week, companies are showcasing new platforms, assistants and functions to make business functions easier. New chatbots and image, video and audio generators are making it possible for computers to seem to behave like humans. And funding flowing in from VC investors is ensuring that companies in the space will continue to move technology forward. Investments into AI startups including OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere helped secure many investors’ spots on this year’s Midas List, Forbes’ ranking of the world’s top venture capitalists.

On the other hand, however, VC investors and business leaders are pitted against each other, fighting over the guardrails, regulations and limitations that should be placed around the developing technology. Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad illustrates this debate; While AI can truly revolutionize the way people do everything—providing virtual healthcare on phones, giving individualized access to education, freeing people from boring and repetitive work—some say it can also bring great risks. Investment powerbrokers including Vinod Khosla and Reid Hoffman say there need to be guardrails in place to ensure safe development of the technology. Other VC heavyweights, including Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado, say that regulation would slow development of AI capabilities, and could lock in a “government-protected cartel” for future development. They support more open-source development of AI, allowing for all to equally benefit and build upon the tech.

There’s a lot at stake—including a lot of money for these top investors. Some may say moves toward slow regulation seem to be winning. In October, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on AI to set government standards for trustworthy AI systems, protect against fraud, strengthen privacy and put guardrails in place to ensure the technology isn’t used in ways that could threaten well-being. In March, the EU passed legislation regulating use of AI that will subject riskier uses of the technology to scrutiny or bans.

However, federal regulators are also closing in on antitrust investigations of companies dealing with AI technology. The New York Times reported Wednesday night that the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have reached a deal to move forward with investigations into the dominant roles Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia are playing in AI, with a probe reportedly forthcoming into Microsoft’s recent deal with Inflection AI.

While there’s a lot to grapple with over the big-picture future of AI, every company is also grappling with ways to use technology and data to run more efficiently and profitably. To make that happen, Zensar Chief Business Officer Anup Rege said, CIOs should work with CMOs. I talked to him about how these two leaders can work together. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

VALUATIONS

It’s been another huge week on the markets, largely thanks to Apple and Nvidia. Both companies saw their valuations cross $3 trillion on Wednesday. Apple had previously crossed the $3 trillion mark, but hasn’t been at that valuation since January. Nvidia met it for the first time—and became the world’s second most valuable company. The frenzy around these two tech companies pushed the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite to records on Wednesday, and they also helped lift other tech stocks, including Taiwan Semiconductor, ASML, Microsoft and Meta.

The Apple and Nvidia rallies were both driven by anticipation. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference begins next week, and many expect to see the company showcasing big steps forward into AI-enabled technology. While developments in AI would be exciting, investors are most interested in seeing how ingrained the technology will be in new models of iPhones. More AI tech on the phone could mean more trade-ins and higher new phone sales, which have been lagging in recent months.

Nvidia’s share price jumped to a record $1,224 at Thursday’s market open based on a Bank of America analyst report increasing the price target for the stock to $1,500 per share. If it doesn’t get there today, it may take a long time to hit that price, however. Tomorrow, Nvidia will execute a 10-to-one stock split, meaning each existing share will be split into 10. The move won’t change the chipmaker’s market cap or impact holdings of existing investors, but it will lower the price for new shares (though they will also be for a smaller portion of the company).

TECHNOLOGY + INNOVATION

Intel previewed its new Lunar Lake mobile Core Ultra processor technology, which uses a new structure to perform complex tasks, like those needed for AI applications, much more efficiently. Forbes senior contributor Dave Altavilla attended the presentation and wrote about the new processor’s technical specs. Lunar Lake, he wrote, is expected to far outperform previous Intel chips in terms of speed and capability. It’s also likely to have high quality graphics and allow ample real estate inside a small laptop for items like memory. The new processors, which are expected to be available in September, helped boost Intel’s shares by more than 1%. At the Computex tech conference in Taiwan, this week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said Intel will play a major role in the AI revolution and likened the transformation to the rise of the internet 25 years ago. “It’s that big,” he said.

Also at the Computex show, Qualcomm unveiled its newest generation of Windows-based laptops, which Forbes senior contributor Antony Leather writes should be available in the next few weeks. Qualcomm said computers with its new Snapdragon X Elite CPU will have greater performance and battery life, potentially being able to go 24 hours between charges even when being used for functions such as content creation and gaming.

FROM THE HEADLINES

With elections, wars, geopolitical upheaval and the Olympic Games on tap, many of the world’s threat detectors have been on high alert for cyber disruptions. Several reports of these attempts made their way to the surface in the last week. OpenAI said in the last three months, it identified and disrupted five influence operations with users in Russia, China, Iran and Israel using its technology—including ChatGPT—to generate content with the purpose of deceptively influencing public opinion and political discourse. OpenAI released a report on covert influence operations utilizing its AI, and concluded that none of these campaigns so far appear to have meaningfully increased their reach or audience engagement by using OpenAI’s technology. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported one of the firms targeted by OpenAI, political marketing firm Stoic, was directed by the Israeli government to use an influence campaign to target U.S. lawmakers and the general public to gain support for Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

A new report from Microsoft also warned that Russia-affiliated groups are attempting to disrupt the upcoming Olympic Games, Forbes senior contributor Emma Woollacott writes. The report says the groups are attacking host country France, President Emmanuel Macron, and the International Olympic Committee. Their aims appear to be damaging the IOC’s reputation and spreading fear about violence and attacks breaking out at the Paris Games this summer. The Kremlin denounced Microsoft’s report, saying it “constitutes absolute slander and nothing more.”

BITS + BYTES

Zensar’s Anup Rege On Why CIOs And CMOs Need To Work Together

In many companies, walls between departments are coming down so once-siloed groups can work together toward a common goal. Zensar Chief Business Officer Anup Rege has noticed the key partnership in businesses today: Bringing together the CIO and CMO. The relationship between these two positions and their departments, he said, is key to the success of every company going forward. I talked to him about this partnership, why it matters, and how to keep the relationship strong.

This conversation has been edited for brevity, clarity and continuity. A longer version can be found here. An excerpt from this conversation also ran in the Forbes CMO newsletter.

What made everyone realize they needed to start taking inventory of data and start working together to use it?

Even if you go back 30, 40 years, the holy grail of every marketing campaign is what they call one-to-one personalization. That’s not very easy to achieve. What has happened is social media and some of these things have accelerated the need for that one-to-one personalization, that hyper-personalization. The only ways companies are able to get closer to that is data. Knowing about who their customers are, who their target is, what are their behaviors, what are their patterns, all of those. If I get something which is relevant to me, I’ll consider it. I think it is the culmination of all of these aspects which has made organizations really focus on data in a big way.

Simplistically put, whatever product and service I have, that has to be marketed effectively. For me to market it effectively, I need to know who to market it to. That marketing would generate a set of data. It will generate a set of expectations with customers. Once that set of expectations of the customers is generated, then when the customer starts interacting with the organization, that experience has to be carried through in the applications, the platforms, whatever interface points that you have with them.

That is where the CIO organization comes in. That CIO organization relies on the same data because they need to be relevant to the customers who are now using their platform to experience what was marketed. That experience generates data. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience, it generates data. And that data is relevant for the other two arms because the marketers would want to know what the experience was so that they can correct whatever is required to be done. The product and services team would need to know that data because they can then build the next version of their product or service based on that data.

If you think about it, this is like a continuous loop. Wherever it works perfectly, those organizations are really successful because they are always connected to the customers. They know what the customers want. They’re doing what is relevant. They’re reacting, they’re engaging well with the customer.

Where this thing is broken, it doesn’t work. Most places it [had been] broken because of the silo, now the organizations are coming together. A lot of them have a long way to go to get the data infrastructure working very well.

Going forward, how important is the CIO-CMO relationship going to be?

That one relationship is going to determine the success of every company. As a fellow peer of mine once said to me, the worst thing you want to do is run a brilliant marketing campaign and then fall flat on the execution, because then people lose trust in the brand. If I’m a CMO, it is in my interest to keep my CIO organization and the platform’s organization completely in tune. If I want to have subsequent successes in whatever marketing I’m doing, I need to make sure that whatever is being followed lives up to the promise that we have made in marketing. That is the common ground for all of them. I see this behavior changing and I see that working really well with mature organizations.

What advice would you give going forward for CIOs and CMOs to keep their relationship strong?

Align on the common outcomes. These outcomes have to be business outcomes, because then all the conversations become easier. You’re talking a common language which everybody understands: the CEO understands, finance understands, the board understands. The outcomes have to be something which is very simple, something that is measurable. It should not require somebody to scratch their head to think, what does this really mean? Affecting your revenue, your number of customers, your profitability, your service parameters, one of those things.

For both of them to be successful, they need to identify quick wins. What are these small things we need to do, which, in a matter of weeks and months, rather than years, can start showing material changes? These changes could be not just in terms of outcomes, but also could become the ways of working together. How can you get the two teams to work together to deliver a common outcome?

[There’s] this new term: creative technologists, which almost bridges the gap between the creative and the tech teams. The creative technologists are these experimenters who use technologies in the creative world to see what works, what doesn’t work. How can you try these different things to see what resonates with the customers? How to use a lot more of test-and-learn approaches, whether it is marketing, whether you’re building platforms.

These very basics—having a common set of outcomes, trying test-and-learn approaches to ways of working and having quick wins—will help set the foundation of building a long-term relationship and a long-term joint successful partnership.

FACTS + COMMENTS

An unidentified attacker used a remote access trojan for an ‘unprecedented’ October 2023 incident that made many small office and home office routers inoperable, a report from Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs found.

600,000+: Number of routers that went offline during the 72-hour attack

49%: Proportion of the ISP’s modems that suddenly dropped

‘We do not assess this to be the work of a nation-state or state-sponsored entity’: The report says, concluding it was likely a deliberate action of one actor

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

Sen. Ron Wyden sent a strongly worded letter to the FTC and SEC asking for an investigation of UnitedHealth Group’s “negligent cybersecurity practices,” which led to a massive disruption of health services and compromised records. Here’s how you can prevent a similar breach—and request for investigations.

AI can play a critical role in enhancing cybersecurity. You can use it to automate responses to threats, as well as find innovative new ways to run security operations.

QUIZ

The National Academy of Inventors released its annual list of the top 100 U.S. universities that received patents in 2023. Which institution was at the top?

A. Stanford University

B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

C. Regents of the University of California

D. Johns Hopkins University

See if you got the answer right here.