CIO 100 Leadership Live New York: CIOs push past AI pilots for measurable returns
Morning roundtable tackles AI infrastructure
The day opened with an invitation-only executive breakfast roundtable, “Beyond the Pilot, Building the Infrastructure for Real AI Returns,” co-hosted by Unisys and Dell Technologies. Over a dozen executives representing major public and private sector organizations across the New York metropolitan area joined Steve Hollander, senior director of Americas global alliances at Dell Technologies, and Matt Marshall, CIO at Unisys for a workshop-style discussion.
The session explored the strategic, operational, financial, and technological issues that must be mastered to optimize infrastructure decisions and separate organizations that are experimenting with AI from those competing on it. Discussion questions probed how CIOs measure whether AI investment is translating into business results, how they can break the cycle of fragmented and siloed AI deployments, how boards are beginning to scrutinize seven-figure token spend and whether on-premises or hybrid infrastructure can rein in costs.
The take-home point: the organizations pulling ahead are the ones that stopped treating AI as four separate problems, strategic, operational, financial, technological, owned by four separate functions, and started running it as one coordinated decision. Fragmentation is the actual cost center here, not the token spend itself. A CIO who solves the infrastructure question in isolation from the governance question, or the cost question in isolation from the talent question, ends up optimizing one silo while the other three keep bleeding value. Competing on AI, instead of just experimenting with it, means the finance, operations, technology and business sides are reasoning from the same picture of what’s being built and why, so the tradeoffs get made once, together, instead of getting re-litigated at every handoff.
