The Futurist Panel: CIO Priorities in an AI-First World

[00:00:00] Intro: Technology has transformed how we live, work, and connect. And behind that change are visionary people with bold ideas. Welcome to the Bridgecast, where host Scott Kinka explores hybrid work, AI, and our evolving future with tech’s brightest minds. Presented by Bridgepointe Technologies, the nation’s leading tech advisory firm. Experience a better way, the Bridgepointe way.

[00:00:35] Scott Kinka: Welcome to another episode of the Bridgecast. We are thrilled to have you join us, and I am thrilled, one, to be here with all of you at the beautiful JW Turnberry in Miami, Florida, for Bridgepointe Tech Summit twenty twenty-five. Can I hear you? All right. Awesome. We love our live episodes, and I love having a conversation with these fine gentlemen who have both been on the show previously. They were both incredibly well-regarded episodes. If you haven’t caught them, please do so, but you’re going to get into their brains today. I’d like to welcome to the stage Chris McFarland, who is the chief development officer of Comcast Business, and Gary Sorrentino, the global CIO of Zoom. And what not, guys? It’s good to see you.

[00:01:27] Chris MacFarland: See you as well. Scott Kinka: Hey. How are you, sir? Please have a seat.

We decided, you’re like, “Okay .” Maybe an odd collection of folks up there for this. We’re going to treat this as a futurist panel. Our theme here has been The Next Wave. We’ve been focusing on waves coming and repeating and opportunities compounding on each other year over year in technology. And for our CIO listeners out there, you know, we feel your pain at the end of the day.

So what we’re going to do, and our format here is going to be pretty simple. I’ve done it with these guys before, so they’re accustomed to it. We’ll share a little bit of data, and then we’re going to banter. It’s really, really that simple. All right? We’re going to spend some time. We’re the only thing between you and lunch, except, of course, if you’re listening at home next week, you can do this on your treadmill. That’s your call. All right.

Let’s start with some CIO priorities as our first topic, and I’ll run through this quick. You don’t need to really stare at the charts. Although, on the video, we’ll edit them in for the listeners at home. Since ’24, IT leaders in North America are feeling more pressure to the tune of about 10% to manage spend. And while still very high, their concern about the broader eco nomy is trending down. But their focus is around cost management. It’s around slowing growth. It’s around tariff concerns.

So before we get into all of this, and we balance it against all the goodness going on, I’ll just ask both of you. Let’s just get it out there. What are you hearing? You talk to CIOs all day, Chris. Are we concerned about what we’re spending?

[00:03:04] Chris MacFarland: A hundred percent. And what’s quite interesting is—and I’ve been on this for a long, long time—is that when you look at, like, the last twenty-five years, there’s definitely pendulums up and down where we’ve got cycles of significant investment in certain technologies and capabilities. But something that’s been persistent now for a decade is this fact that, one, the role of the CIO and the broader IT teams have become true business partners. But at the same time, if they’re not able to define the impact on the business—whether it’s go-to-market, product services, or the underlying support components to make the enterprise run—they’re just asked to do more with less. And that’s people, capital, and then even the services that they’re utilizing from companies like us and Zoom and others where, you know, they’re definitely trying to squeeze every last dollar. So there’s this focus on rapid efficiency. And then when you look at the spaces that are hot right now, I think we’ll probably talk about AI a little bit. Yep. And then, secondarily, cybersecurity is not only top of mind, but even today, most, not all, but most CIOs feel like they’ve got exposure in and remediation programs that they’re working through, which requires investment. Scott Kinka: Got it. Gary, anything to add there?

[00:04:18] Gary Sorrentino: I mean, think about it: 10%. Right? So I’m in technology forty-five years. I’m trying to think of one year where they didn’t ask me to save 10%. Okay. So it’s normal. Yeah. Right? More or less, we’ve heard it for our whole lives, our whole careers. It’s part of our mantra. It’s what we do.

I think the difference today is this : It’s not really about saving 10%. It’s about taking dollars and putting them in the right place. And I think he said it correctly: We are now better business partners with the business. Now we have our partners at the table with us. Yeah. Where before, we would buy technology. Look, I did JPMorgan. Most people know it before. And a lot of times, we would buy technology, and you would use it. And if you didn’t like it, there are a lot of other banks you can work at. Yeah. It’s a little different now. Right? Our business partners—we are now partners with them. So now it’s about how do we leverage better what we have?

We all know we overspend. Think about in your own lives, how many subscriptions you have that you haven’t used? Right? How much technology have you bought that overlaps with other technology? Right? And how much of us have that shelf in the backroom called “licenses we’ll never use”? So, really, think about 10%. Is that a lot? Probably not. Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:05:25] Gary Sorrentino: And I think in any one of our lives, we could easily cut 10% out, or we could take 10% and reapply it to something that’ll give us more value. And I really think that’s where we’re headed now. The 10% doesn’t scare me. It’s more or less for every single CEO I worked for my whole life. Scott Kinka: Yeah. No. I would agree.

You know, one of the challenges here is we’re hearing all this. We just got a couple of panels done. You know, we’re talking about all this investment coming into AI, and then customers that’s going to need to be monetized. And we’re not monetizing it on 10% savings swinging the other way out of IT.

But let’s get to the AI topic. Right? I’m so maybe we’re not that concerned about it. There’s a lot on this slide, and I’ll just tell you what it says. Effectively, what it says is the bottom line is the mention of the word tariffs in public filings , and the blue line, which is way above it, is the excitement line around AI. So while we might be concerned looking for that 10%, we’re certainly not more concerned about that than we are excited about the potential of AI.

You guys have seen this slide in the studio audience, but for those who are at home, we shared this earlier yesterday around the top initiatives of CIOs. Right? And there’s a lot of words on here, but the reality of it is two of the five are directly about AI, and three of the five are at least tangentially connected to AI, really, at the end of the day. So there’s a lot on here : distributing data and AI access, developing a future-proof workforce, extending identity assurance with zero trust security, proactively mitigating the risks of emerging technology, building exponential product teams that can actually realize that AI value.

So, Gary, I’ll come to you first on this one. And you talked quite a bit, and you just did it. Both of you did it about partnering better with the business. Are current IT departments—the customers you meet with, the CIOs you meet with—prepared at this point to tackle these initiatives when they’ve got, in many ways, a twenty- or thirty-year history of being more like, you know, back in the closet, keeping the lights on? What’s it going to require out of the modern IT department?

[00:07:29] Gary Sorrentino: I think the difference is this: The modern IT department needs to think about the user more than it did before. See, we had databases and guardrails, and we knew that an application could look at data and that the developers were worried about the security and that if someone couldn’t type in something in one system. But today, the boundaries are down, and the curiosity of the users is up. So now we have these compelling forces where we’re building data lakes. We’re not enforcing some of the rules that we did before. We’re trying to figure out how to feed this AI engine because it only lives on—it lives on power and data. Okay? Power we get. Data we have a problem with. So as we’re shoveling more data into there, maybe some of the rule sets aren’t going with it.

There’s going to be a day where someone’s going to go on to one of the favorite public AI tools, and it’s going to ask about a salary about a particular person, notable, and the whole salary structure of that firm is going to come right out on their computer. Right? And we’re just waiting for that day. So the problem is today is we have to think differently. Yeah. Because some of the controls that were in place that were built by the development teams and the vendors’ products that we bought, those are going away. We have to supplement now. Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:08:40] Gary Sorrentino: We have to figure out the difference between guardrails and gates. And we have to figure out the way between security and progress. And that’s a balance. That’s a muscle that we probably always had but didn’t use efficiently. And so now I think we need to just need to think differently. Look, we can’t hold things back because it’s going to move with or without us. Yeah. Right? Now it’s a matter of how do we build an environment where people can stay curious, but we can keep it safe? And it’s a new way of thinking.

[00:09:07] Scott Kinka: Is that, Chris, is that a—I love the balance analogy there. And I do think one of the big changes is that the CIO has—you both used the words partner and partner with the line of business there in the boardroom. But is that strategic conversation, Gary, that you were just laying out, is that a CIO decision, or is that an executive leadership team decision kind of balancing, you know, protection and and, um, you know, propriety versus progress and speed? Chris MacFarland: Yeah. I think it’s all over the pendulum depending on where that enterprise is at and kind of their AI strategy and road map.

Maybe a couple of interesting tidbits. One, if you look at the most recent, you know, GDP of our country here in The United States, and you double-click into the GDP growth, almost a third of our GDP growth was related to AI and AI infrastructure. Think the data centers, the power systems, the GPUs, and then the cloud providers, and the other AI-focused businesses that are sitting on there. And so I think we’re at a really interesting moment in time because that part of our economy is incredibly healthy, and the rest of it is okay at best. And certain industries are, like, in big trouble. Think housing and the auto industry today. And so we see that and hear that because we serve, you know, almost everybody.

But I think when you look at how we were thinking about AI inside of Comcast, it’s kind of in five broad categories. You’ve got the core infrastructure side of the component. We’ve made these massive bets and been able to bring it to life where we’ve got these amazing, you know, capabilities inside of the infrastructure that’s reduced the amount of human labor, and then you got the robotics components that are taking place that’s still core infra.

And then I think the part where I think most businesses are at, and this is where I think the channel can help companies as they’re going down their own development, is this, like, the workforce components. And so from strategic planning to project management to just having another voice in the room is how we’re seeing most managers to senior-level executives. What we’re definitely doing today is, like, when you have a meeting, you know, is ChatGPT or ROC or whatever platform that your enterprise is using, are you leveraging its synthetic intelligence to help you just move faster?

So, like, in our case, you know, we have—we’ve got 2,000 lawyers on staff , but, amazingly enough, we still leverage, like, another 2,000 outside of the business, which is just insane in its own thoughts. And they’re great. They’re great, by the way. But we’ve been able to implement technologies like Harvey where we’ve been able to dramatically reduce our contract administration. We’ve been able to—we’ve been able to reduce our consulting fees, you know, like pushing 80%. Scott Kinka: Yeah.

[00:12:00] Chris MacFarland: Because we can do 90% of the work today with generative AI and then give it to BCG or McKinsey or Deloitte and say, “Hey. Confirm that you think this is right .” Yeah. So you’re just talking about a huge reduction in the teams that you have to spend up and the work that’s taking place.

And then thirdly, it’s around how do you leverage your own customer engagement , and that’s where I think we’ve made huge strides and continue to have this kind of massive road map between now and 2030 where we’re focused on how do we greatly enhance the customer experience. So we just recently launched, you know, on the enterprise side of the Comcast Business website, a generative AI function to where you can engage and talk about any of the solutions, products. It’ll start with the, you know, basic designs, talk to you about things. And so now what historically where we would wrap a large team around an enterprise, we can now do this for mid-market customers and we can do it for smaller businesses. And I think this is kind of the precursor to next year or the year after where we’re going to have agents talking to each other, and underneath that, you’ll have, um, agents talking back and forth. So when you think about things like NAS or you think about how you’re going to interconnect with certain systems, you’ll be able to spin things up and down, you know, where this will just going to become so efficient that it’s going to be mind-blowing. And I think that’s one of the things that excites me the most.

The hard part that you alluded to is everybody’s got to go through their own governance process. They’ve got to go through how are they going to allow synthetic intelligence work in their own business. How do you put the right guardrails in place? Because you do have, you know, really proprietary information that you need to protect. You know, some of the generative AI challenges have been hallucinations. What I could tell you definitively is that when you narrow the scope and make it a little bit more specific and less general— Gary Sorrentino: Yeah.

[00:13:52] Chris MacFarland: —we see these amazing outcomes. We see that with some of the OEM components as well as our own technology. So I think it’s an amazing time.

And the last thing that we’re trying to solve for is how do we build a set of tools so that we can put this cognitive synthetic intelligence into workflows from an automation standpoint. And I think everybody, you know, that’s got—it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got five employees or, you know, a hundred thousand. You’re trying to figure out how do you—how do you just become more consistent? And I think the guys that are in the broader CX world around AI agents that can talk on the phone or text or email, you know, we’re seeing these amazing results where the empathy factor is, like, dramatically higher than most customer service agents. And if you think about it practically speaking, it surprised me. So I was like, “No .” We got to double-click on this. Why is this happening? And the reality is is that you take a customer service call as a customer service agent and you have a bad experience and you get yelled at, your job on that next call is harder. Oh, yeah. Of course. Right? And the AI doesn’t care. You can yell at it all day long. It goes to the next call and is still happy. AI doesn’t get emotional in the moment.

[00:14:59] Scott Kinka: It’s only pretending today at the—at the end.

Well, it’s interesting because you mentioned the economy. This is a Morgan Stanley stat at the beginning of the year. It estimates that AI productivity—this is the productivity side, not the driving of the infrastructure and everything that you talked about—could add about 30 basis points to the S&P 500’s net margins in 2025. And yet, CEOs say, “I—I don’t know. I’m not getting any value out of this,” right, at the end of the day. And then you see from some of the folks you mentioned, BCG poor returns , abandoned pilots from McKinsey, 70%. Like, what’s the experience of what’s happening in the field? You guys are two of the largest tech companies in The United States. I expect that you’ll have your act together around what you want to do with AI, but what’s, Gary, what’s practically happening right now with the customers you talk to in terms of their AI implementations?

[00:15:48] Gary Sorrentino: So I think what they’re trying to do right now is we are trying to flush everything. We’re trying to figure out how to solve too many problems at once , which is good because the goal is how do we keep our employees curious and how do we make them constantly understand that we’re coming up with a new technology, brand new, uh, that’s going to help them be better at their jobs. A problem is, like, we—we heard the other day—there was—I was sat in one of these where 80% of the companies are seeing they’re getting value, but 80% of the projects are failing. I don’t know. I didn’t—I didn’t know how to rationalize. But that doesn’t make sense. Right?

But at the end of the day, what happens is I don’t think we’re looking at the outcomes correctly. If you look at the board, the board wants to know about headcount. Right? If you look at the end clients, they want to know about SAT scores. Okay? And the employee wants to know about how do you make my life better. Yeah. The problem is what’s the ROI? So when you say an ROI in a company, you have to figure out where are you sitting in that company for this project to be successful. If your employees get one hour with their families more in a day because when they go home—how many of us go home and jump—have dinner and then jump on mail? Right? Or jump on the computer until 10:00 at night. If your employees only jumped on their computer till 9:00 at night, is that a value? Scott Kinka: Yeah. To who? Gary Sorrentino: Not to the people paying the bills. Exactly. Exactly. So what’s happening is today is we’re using old measuring sticks to measure new outcomes, and I think that’s one of the things we have to look at. We have to really look at these—the way people are applying AI and say, at different levels, yes. Look. Some of the new CX stuff that’s out there is going to make some headcount go away, or it’s going to improve external scores. Got it. We can measure them. The problem is there are a lot more people like you talked about. Hey , we can do something, take 80% out, and then give the outcome to an external person to have them check it. Okay. That’s a measurable outcome. But what if all your employees become happier? What if, at the end of the day, they did a better job? And what if your attrition rate went down? Yeah. How do you put those values into how we’re measuring ROI? And I think today, we need to almost throw the old book out because we’re using the same books that we used forever. Right? But we’re trying to—like you said, The Next Wave. Well, are we going to measure the next wave’s success with the old measuring stick?

[00:18:11] Scott Kinka: Well, that’s the hardest part. We’re going to get into—we’re—we know the topics we’re roughly getting into. Right? And one of them is going to be around the way we work. And I think you’re—you’re right, which is, and I’m—I’m going to just jump ahead here real quick if we’ve gotten to some of this unless you guys see that. Chris MacFarland: Let me add one thing about the failures because I spent about a quarter of my time— Scott Kinka: On the topic.

[00:18:31] Chris MacFarland: And when you look at the failures, it comes down to two basic things. One, because of some of the consulting firms, Fortune 500 and Global 2000, they swung for the fences when the tech wasn’t quite ready yet. And then, two, the amount of technical debt that exists in larger enterprises, you couldn’t even fathom. Like, how much technical debt? I even think about it inside of Comcast. Like, there is technical debt across the 180 systems that we use some form or fashion, and then the governance component is challenging.

So I think most businesses like us have pivoted to how do you find incremental projects where you can map a path to success and you can map out the change management process , which, I’ll be very blunt, most professionals that are not in IT or really tech-savvy are not happy about this because I see all the negative headwinds, like, “Am I going to lose my job ?” “How does this change me ?” Right? I think we’re in a period of time where this makes people superhuman that lean in. But at the same time, there is this precipice that we’re, I don’t know, pick a number, five years away where there’s this cataclysmic change where we’re all going to have to work in a very different way. Whereas whether you’re a five-team shop or a large enterprise, you’re going to become super efficient because of these capabilities, but it’s going to be incremental progress and not like this massive sea change , and these early projects were all massive sea change, and I think nine out of ten failed. Scott Kinka: Try to go too big.

[00:20:02] Chris MacFarland: Too big, too fast.

[00:20:03] Gary Sorrentino: The one thing I would say is there’s a lot of little projects that aren’t getting counted as success. Chris MacFarland: Yeah. Gary Sorrentino: Okay. There are projects that people are doing using the tools that we gave them on their desktop now that are making their lives better, that are making their customers’ lives better, that they’re delivering better. They’re doing AI testing, things like that that aren’t getting measured , right, that are actually adding value to a company. And maybe we’re not measuring them because we’re afraid that if we can tell our bosses, “Hey, we can process contracts in thirty minutes, not three weeks ,” the boss might say, “What?” Scott Kinka: I might not need you.

[00:20:34] Gary Sorrentino: Yeah. Exactly. So you know what I’ll do? I’ll keep that success under my belt, and I won’t put it on the scoreboard.

[00:20:40] Scott Kinka: Well, we’re going to explore the people side of this in one second. Just one more kind of comment at the corporate level. You know, I think, is there a consideration here too that we are driving—we are pushing these AI projects forward because, you know, there’s—there’s board level pressure. There’s executive, like, “I want to have an AI story. Go get me one .” Do you see—do you think that’s also feeding some of this project sprawl?

[00:21:08] Chris MacFarland: Um, yes. I think there’s two driving factors from the C-suite. One is this—this uncertainty around what’s around the corner as AI continues to evolve and other technologies that are, you know, adjacent to it. And so I think one, you know, people have seen these other industries get disrupted, but we’re at a moment in time where some of these technologies, as they make more advances, like, it’s a huge sea change. And I think every Fortune 500 company is looking at this and, like, “Okay. How do I compete ?” Because before, I could look at my durable moat that I had in my business and have great confidence that it was going to be really hard for a new entrant to have my scale economics and other things. But we’re in a period of time now where a ten-person team employing some of these technologies and figuring it out can disrupt in a way that we’ve never seen disruption before. We’ve seen a lot of disruption and new things come to life. But I think they’re a bit scared because they hear from, you know, Sam Altman and, you know, the CEOs of Microsoft and Google talking about, like, what they’re doing inside of their company. And I will tell you, like, even for us, we write a lot of software. We’ve gone from 5% of the code two years ago being AI-generated. Today, we’re publicly—we’re telling everybody we’re at 30%. I think we’re on a path to get, you know, double efficiency within the next year. And so there’s just, like, these things that you look at, and it’s like—and we’re not trying to, like, wipe out software development teams. We’re just trying to develop at a much faster pace. Sure.

[00:22:36] Scott Kinka: Certainly, that’s there. The question is where do you put the save? Is it—are you driving top line, or are you experiencing the savings? And we’ll get there. We’ll certainly get to—I want to just throw this up here, um, because you were—you guys were focusing a lot on end users, and there’s a couple of topics we should unpack in there. So for those of you who weren’t in the AI panel yesterday, and certainly those listening at home would not have been, but we shared this stat, which is that ChatGPT is the fastest-growing shadow IT app of all time. All right. So your customer or you, frankly, if you’re a CIO listening at home, there is—there’s access to ChatGPT going on inside your business, and users are using it to solve their own problems , right, underneath this. So while we’re talking about these failed projects, I mean, is it a reasonable path to go to just say, “You know what? Let’s just embrace the people that are doing this and figure out what they’re trying to solve ?” Like, how would you—how would you get after that? Gary, I’m going to come to you first.

[00:23:34] Gary Sorrentino: Well, but think about that. Right? You have to do that. They’re going to do it either way. Right? We’ve always worried about shadow IT. We’ve always worried about people going home and and doing things. But today, it’s on their phone. They can ask a question to their phone to get an answer that you need. If it says, “Hey. I need a quick write-up on, I don’t know, how to process a new claim,” right, they can probably get that in thirty seconds from an external source. So the problem is, do you fight that or embrace that?

[00:23:58] Scott Kinka: Listen. If you made it this far, there must have been some good content, or you’re just a fan or a relative of mine. In either case, we appreciate you spending your most valuable asset with us, your time. We don’t take that lightly. We’d also like to say one more time that we’re appreciative of Bridgepointe Technologies and their belief and sponsorship of this show. We hope that if you or someone you know is thinking about your company’s digital transformation or simply the next IT project that you may not have the resources, budget, or time to get to, I’m sure that Bridgepointe, one of the country’s fastest-growing technology advisory and procurement firms, can help. Check out bridgepointetechnologies.com. Don’t forget the e on Bridgepointe, or simply reach out to me at Skinka, s-k-i-n-k-a, at bptthree.net. Also, take a minute, please, if you would, to give us a five-star review on your favorite platform. It helps give us the visibility to reach other people like you. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Bridgecast. I’m Scott Kinka. And until next time, there’s a lot of noise out there in business and in life. Do what you can to be the signal.