Discover Forbes' 2025 CIO Next list, featuring top Chief Information Officers and tech leaders driving transformation and digital strategy in today's tech landscape.
the CIO role has evolved from a purely technical one into a remit that crosses a smorgasbord of disciplines that include everything from risk management to strategic transformation.The pace of AI development has grown increasingly dizzying over the past few years,with companies struggling to embrace it for fear of being left behind.
But the results haven’t always lived up to the hype–Ensuring the success of a company’s AI strategy usually falls to Chief Information Officers, who now find themselves confronted with a twofold challenge — vetting and adopting the new technologies that promise to improve their businesses and ensuring they achieve their intended results. This list honors all who do that — CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Digital Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and the like. Now in its sixth year, the Forbes CIO Next list recognizes executives across a wide array of sectors: fast-casual restaurant chains like CAVA and Chipotle, banks and financial institutions like BNY and Block, retailers like Ulta Beauty and J. Crew and entertainment companies like Tubi and the National Football League. The executives assembled here all led major digital transformations in their companies. In 2025, many did so by using AI for tangible business impact. Some are using chatbots to handle simple tasks, freeing up humans to focus on more complex issues. Others are using AI models to improve business processes, such as helping to write code or keep an eye on kitchens to monitor restaurant inventories. Simplification is another theme: over the decades, large organizations have garnered thousands of legacy apps the way ships attract barnacles, and many leaders on the list saw big impacts from simply consolidating and upgrading their company’s digital toolboxes. To compile this list,issued a call for nominations and consulted with experts and trade organizations to find worthy candidates. After reviewing hundreds of names, staffers poured through applications to find 50 standouts that exemplify excellence in the role. Of note, this list isn’t ranked; instead, it’s meant to be a spotlight on the best and brightest in the field. We prioritized candidates who are making big impacts at their companies, with recent accomplishments and tangible successes. For the past four years, Mike Amend has led automotive giant Ford through a significant technology transformation. After relying on its own data centers for decades, the company is now transitioning to a mix of cloud infrastructure and cloud software providers. Amend believes this more elastic, multi-cloud backbone will future-proof the company while allowing for AI innovation at scale. The migration has already freed up significant on-premises computing power for more strategic projects, with some legacy systems seeing a 75% reduction in processing time. He also launched Ford’s internal AI platform, which more than 33,000 employees use to automate everyday tasks. As CIO, Kim Basile was essential to guiding Kyndryl through its spin-off from technology giant IBM into a fully independent public IT firm, which entailed architecting the transition of roughly 80,000 employees. She led a sweeping overhaul of the company’s reliance on legacy applications–reducing their number from 1,800 to fewer than 360 in just two years, and accelerated its AI adoption, creating a lab for experimenting with the latest tools along with a governance board to ensure responsible use. More than half of employees report saving more than 10 hours per week using Copilot and other tools. Prior to Kyndryl, she held critical roles at several other large companies, including Leidos, Lockheed Martin, and Vanguard. Since becoming Chief Information and Operations Officer in 2021, Paul Beswick has led a massive unification of professional services firm Marsh McLennan’s technology, integrating the IT systems of four businesses into a single operation employing around 5,000 technologists, eliminating silos and bolstering collaboration. He also led implementation of LenAI, an internal generative AI tool created by the company’s Dublin Innovation Center that automates repetitive tasks for the company’s roughly 90,000 employees. With an 89% adoption rate, the company estimates the technology has saved workers more than 100 hours each year and generated an additional $160 million in productivity gains. As the Mayo Clinic's first Chief Clinical Systems and Informatics Officer, Edwina Bhaskaran leads a team of more than 1,000 people across various departments ranging from operations to information management, and also manages the healthcare system’s deployment of generative AI. This has improved patient communication, sped up clinical documentation and helped thousands of clinicians make faster decisions for more than three million patients. She also modernized clinical systems that now process billions of data points daily, deliver near-instant imaging and sustain record-low downtime. Under her leadership, IT teams completed 92% of 24,000 system change requests within 90 days, a company record. The Mayo Clinic now operates a significantly more stable, secure and efficient clinical systems infrastructure and the Systems Innovation Accelerator she established now serves as proving ground for the Mayo Clinic’s digital pilot programs. Mike Bidgoli led product teams at social media giants like Meta, Pinterest and Instacart before starting his role at Tubi a year and a half ago. There, he ensures that the streaming platform can support an audience of millions while satisfying advertisers. He improved ad technologies and AI-driven content personalization, which led to new adtech partnerships with Amazon, Moloco, Innovid, and Kochava. His biggest challenge to date? Ensuring Tubi’s live 4K streaming of Super Bowl LIX in February went smoothly. Throughout the day’s programming, the platform handled 24 million unique viewers with an average of 13.6 million people clocking in per minute without issue. Due to this success, the company plans to stream this year’s Thanksgiving Day NFC North showdown, the most-watched regular-season NFL game of the year. After taking on the CIO role for the NFL in 2023, Gary Brantley has launched the NFL Innovation Hub to test and deploy new technology, established an AI and emerging technology governance council and secured a data infrastructure partnership with data storage company NetApp to manage the league’s data. He also deployed AI-driven optical tracking technology with six new cameras and computer systems to replace the traditional manual, on-field tracking, allowing for more precise measurements and ultimately more fair calls and fewer disruptions to the flow of the game. Under his leadership, he guided the NFL to focus on enhancing fan engagement through initiatives such as the “Ask Vince” AI agent that can answer event-related questions and automated translation and localization of content for international markets. Carter Busse has led enterprise automation company Workato’s technology and AI implementation for the past five years. In 2025, he launched the G28 initiative: 28 KPI-driven AI agents called “Genies” that autonomously run business processes across the company such as IT. Genies have reduced software costs by 28% and generated $2.7 million in pipeline within just 30 days of deployment, directly contributing to revenue growth. Under Busse’s leadership, Workato’s IT team has also enabled its customers to build their own AI agents. Carter also created his own CIO Council forum, where he convenes 50 to 60 VP-level and CIO-level leaders to discuss practical frameworks for AI transformation. Dan Carmichael is helping shape the emerging field of AI security, both for Dataminr and its customers as well as the industry as a whole. His team developed and deployed internal AI agents that conduct 24/7 automated testing and risk flagging, reducing the time to test and review new software releases by 85% throughout 2025. He also helped reduce the time to resolve cybersecurity threats by 55% this year. Outside of Dataminr, Carmichael served on the advisory board responsible for creating the industry’s first AI security professional certification for the Information Systems Audit and Control Association. He also helped the company become one of the first 40 organizations worldwide to secure an ISO 42001 certification, the first international standard for AI management systems. For four years, Jay Cavalcanto has overseen a team of 800 IT professionals and an annual budget of over $500 million at energy company Constellation, which he’s invested in digital transformation and cybersecurity. He spearheaded process automation across the company that reduced costs by 20% with a 40% improvement in incident response times. Under his direction, Constellation’s IT department migrated over 300,000 customers to a new unified platform to consolidate three external portals customers previously had to use separately. This involved seamlessly transitioning 286 services and 1,320 applications to the new platform while removing 184 legacy systems in the process. At identity and access management company Okta, Jenna Cline is creating, executing and scaling technology solutions for more than 6,000 employees. In a year and a half, her team rolled out Gemini and more than 60 other AI tools and features across the company. Those tools are now on track to save more than 250,000 hours of productive time this fiscal year, including more than 50,000 for the customer support team alone due to decreased ticket time. Her team also rolled out a new IT model that offers 24-hour support, five days per week, to all employees, with a homegrown AI chatbot that can automatically handle more than half of user questions, saving thousands of hours and letting IT workers focus on the hardest problems. Employee adoption of generative AI tools is currently at almost 90% company-wide. Keith Credendino spearheaded one of the most complex technology initiatives in the company’s history: launching a digital marketplace that enabled third-party sellers on macys.com and bloomingdales.com. This required deep cross-functional collaboration, aligning 25 teams and appeasing more than 250 stakeholders while modifying over 40 distinct business and technology systems. Delivered on time and at a cost of $55 million, the platform added 400 unique third-party brands across 20 product categories, with eight being entirely new to Macy’s, creating both new revenue streams and new options for customers. Under Credendino’s leadership, the technology team migrated one of the nation’s largest retail websites entirely to the cloud, and developed the technology for Macy’s new customer fulfillment and replenishment center in China Grove, North Carolina, considered its largest and most advanced to date. In his role as Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, Bhavesh is responsible for S&P Global’s AI vision and strategy. Before that, he was at AI company Kenosha for years, leading its technology growth until it was acquired in 2018 for $550 million by S&P Global. Since then, the financial giant has invested more than $1 billion in AI to transform its hoards of data into actionable insights. In 2023, Bhavesh was appointed Chief AI Officer, using his work at Kenosha to establish an AI-first culture across the enterprise, including the creation of the AI platform Spark Assist, which allows employees to share custom workflows and personalize various models and agents for their own internal use. Launched in 2024, it’s now regularly used by more than 25,000 employees. Ashley Devoto has been leading cybersecurity operations for the tire and wheel retailer Discount Tire for the last two years, unifying strategy across 30,000 employees and 1,200 locations. Right now she’s spearheading a $175 million modernization program—the company’s largest technology initiative in two decades—to embed stronger security in the sales process. She also supports the growth of the company’s eleven business segments during instances such as mergers and acquisitions by bringing in cybersecurity as a top priority. She was previously the president and CISO of cybersecurity company CISO Global and worked on cyberspace operations for the U.S. Air Force for over a decade. Over the past three years at GSK, Michael Elmore has bridged scientific ambition and digital trust in one of the world’s most sensitive industries. He has helped build the pharmaceutical giant's cybersecurity program with an investment of $135 million in more than 120 projects in hiring and launching new programs. For example, his team implemented security measures that reduced risk of hackers being able to spread through a network after gaining initial access by 70% and helped consolidate the company’s data platforms into one dashboard, enabling AI-powered simulations to find vulnerabilities in the company’s data infrastructure. Additionally, he has aligned GSK with external bodies like the AI education nonprofit Global Council for Responsible AI to help implement transparent AI use practices internally. As the Department of State's CIO, Dr. Kelly Fletcher works to create and deploy technology solutions for over 100,000 people located in 190 countries. One of those is StateChat, a generative AI chatbot rolled out to employees in August 2024, which has already reduced administrative friction by speeding up policy sourcing, automating document formatting and translating and summarizing information in more than 100 languages. She also helped launch Online Passport Renewal last year, which has already helped millions of Americans obtain new documents without sending forms or photos by mail. However, her most notable accomplishment was leading the Department's cybersecurity efforts during the compromise of Microsoft's cloud environment by a Chinese hacking group in 2023. Of the more than 20 organizations that were hacked, only the State Department correctly identified the activity, and its proper alerting prevented further data exfiltration for the company's users. Stephen Franchetti, Samsara’s first CIO, has seen the fleet management company go from a private company generating $100M to a public company bringing in $1.6 billion annually. He helped launch AI tools that have cut support ticket volume by 59%, reduced help desk case resolution times by 27% and boosted engineering productivity with AI-assisted coding. Additionally, sales productivity rose 16% after his team implemented an AI chatbot that helps employees extract and understand data. He has also started company-wide programs to encourage employees to use AI securely and efficiently. Ann Funai started her career at IBM, spending 20 years managing IT and software systems before leaving for stints at PeopleAdmin, MyFitnessPal and Under Armour. Two years ago, she returned to help the technology giant better prepare for an AI-fueled future along with fellow CIO Matt Lyteson. In that time, she orchestrated the migration of more than 150,000 users to a cloud-based internal platform, which has streamlined operations, reduced infrastructure-related costs by 30%, decreased invoice cycle time by 80% and sped up the time it takes to register new contracts by 40%. It also resulted in a 25% reduction in the need for custom code, which improves efficiency and makes future upgrades easier. Her team also helped deploy AskHR, an internal AI agent that automates more than 80 tasks for human resource managers and now handles over 2.1 million worker complaints per year. Since joining Chipotle a decade ago, Curt Garner has been essential in scaling the restaurant chain’s digital arm into a multibillion-dollar growth engine by revamping its app and website, integrating delivery partners like Doordash and Uber Eats and launching the company’s rewards program, which now boasts more than 20 million active users. Last year he built on this by leading the launch of Chipotle U, a loyalty program specifically designed for college students. Digital purchases now make up more than 35% of the restaurant chain’s sales, compared to 5% in 2015. He also spearheaded a partnership with AI company Paradox to build "Ava Cado,” an HR virtual assistant that has cut overall hiring time for restaurant managers by 75% and improved the application completion rate for candidates from around 50% to more than 85%. Under Alvaro Garrido's leadership, London-based bank Standard Chartered has overhauled its cybersecurity strategy over the past few years, using adaptive detection and AI-driven analytics to reduce risk and integrating security functions into a single system. He established the Cyber Culture Quotient, a behavioral analytics framework that quantifies cyber risk across the organization. His team has neutralized over 100 phishing campaigns and reduced the time it takes to detect major cybersecurity incidents by 40%, enabling the company to fix credit card fraud exposures 36 times faster. Notably, Garrido also oversaw the global roll-out of SC GPT this year, a customized generative AI tool that automates procedures and simplifies software development for the company's nearly 80,000 employees. As Global CISO of Topgolf Callaway Brands, Rosalia Hajek has re-engineered and modernized the enterprise’s entire business continuity and disaster recovery ecosystem. Under her direction, the tech-enabled golf company established a cybersecurity playbook enabling100% recoverability of critical systems. She also spearheaded a sweeping overhaul of company data, cleaning and tagging 20 terabytes of vital information and introducing an internal classification model that clearly defines which data is confidential, and essential across the business so that it can be of optimal use in training AI models. Her new model now serves as the foundation for responsible AI deployment across the organization, reducing potential exposure risk by 70% while accelerating AI-enabled initiatives by more than 60%. When Thomson Reuters acquired AI document analyzer startup ThoughtTrace in 2022, it also snapped up its CTO, Joel Hron. Since then, he’s helped launch multiple generative AI-based research and verification tools for legal, tax, and risk management professionals, as well as an AI-fueled safety framework. Crucially, he’s also drawn on his own startup experience to architect the company’s acquisition strategy, which insists on letting startups have consistent internal goals for at least a year. Thomson Reuters has invested about $3.2 billion in acquisitions since he joined, recently bringing on organizations such as Casetext, Materia, Safe Sign, Additive, SafeSend, SurePrep, and Pagero, and the company credits Hron’s integration playbook for successfully navigating them. In 2017, CIO Niall Johnston launched HP's first Customer Support AI agent, which handles 19 million support cases annually, 78% of which were entirely solved by AI–yielding a 92% customer satisfaction score within 2 months of launch while freeing up employees to handle tougher customer problems. He and his team also automated 80% of the company’s application testing with an AI-driven model that cut costs by 50%. For HP employees, he reduced the number of apps and tech tools employees use by 23% this year, streamlining operations. Niall moved HP’s employee satisfaction score from 53% last year to 70% this year through improving their experiences with onboarding tech support and software updates. Over the course of Gopi Joshi’s 20-year career at Mastercard, he has been responsible for ensuring all 160 billion of the credit card company’s annual global transactions are successfully processed. He designed and deployed the Mastercard Transaction Stream platform in February, which enables real-time, instant payments in over 150 currencies and across 220 territories. He was able to achieve this by implementing AI-driven risk management testing that can simultaneously process transactions on both legacy systems and the new platform. This deployment earned Joshi a Mastercard CEO Award and was the most significant architectural change to Mastercard’s core payments network in decades. As CIO of Principal Financial Group, Kathy Kay has deployed AI for more than 100 use cases such as investment research, code quality improvement and fraud detection. As a result, 97% of the financial service’s engineers reported higher productivity, with 61% citing improved code quality. She also launched and scaled the company’s internal AI assistant, which now has over 8,500 active users across the company. Employees using the tool have reported up to 50%-time savings on content creation, documentation and research. She also trained 20,000 employees on AI and data fluency and established an AI Center of Excellence to help deliver and scale AI responsibly through the entire firm. Since joining Unilever in 2021, Sam Kini has led Unilever through a complete infrastructure migration, shifting one of the world’s largest consumer goods manufacturers to a 100% cloud-based business. It’s part of the company’s “One Technology” strategy which aims to streamline IT across the board, prepare the company’s infrastructure for AI adoption, and refresh cybersecurity processes. Thus far, this plan has saved the company £100 million . Kini is also in charge of up-skilling employees and educating them on the best ways to use AI throughout their work, and her team is on track to have trained more than 25,000 globally by the end of this year. For the past couple of years, Melanie Kirkwood Ruiz has led technology at 100-year-old office management provider ABM Industries, which provides janitorial, engineering, electrical, lighting, parking, landscaping and other services to more than 20,000 global clients. Her team is credited with the launch of ABM Connect, a workplace app that allows the company’s more than 100,000 employees and 10,000 clients to communicate while on the go. She also managed the technology integrations of major acquisitions, including a $1.5 billion take over of the largest family-owned provider of building maintenance in the country, Able Services. ABM Industries also claims that the data-enabled smart parking solution Kirkwood Ruiz’s team deployed has increased parking use at Los Angeles International Airport by 28% and decreased congestion by 35%. Thirteen years after joining Cloudflare, Dane Knecht was appointed to the chief technology officer position in March. Since then, he’s deployed software enabling the company’s developers to build intelligent agents in a secure and cost-efficient manner. This included a program to securely connect internal AI systems with the company’s data sources and tools, as well as the acquisition of developer database company Outerbase in April to improve developers’ ability to build agents. He is also spearheading Cloudflare’s latest efforts to hire 1,111 interns in 2026. Jason Lau is advancing security and operations as Chief Information Security Officer of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com. In his eight years in the role, he spearheaded an AI-powered transformation of security operations, automating over 100 workflows that saved the company $1.2 million annually. He also launched the industry’s largest bug bounty program, which pays out $2 million to anyone who finds flaws in the company’s software before they can be exploited by cybercrooks. Under his leadership, Crypto.com became the first global crypto exchange to achieve multiple security certifications. Outside of, Lau contributed to the development of the industry’s first AI cybersecurity certifications and serves on the board of directors at Information Systems Audit and Control Association, which provides credentialing and education for IT professionals. Peter Ludwig leads Applied Intuition’s technical vision as it drives the next era of autonomous vehicles. He has led the launch of multiple solutions to enable the U.S. Department of Defense and allied militaries to build, test and deploy autonomous vehicle systems efficiently. These products require the combination of the latest AI and machine learning techniques with the safety measures for high-risk operations. In addition, he oversaw the launch of the company’s automated parking development solution, which allows vehicles to park themselves up to 12 times faster while reducing costs by up to 70% and improving its vehicles' ability to detect its own surroundings. In just two years, Mike Maresca has delivered a complete IT overhaul at Ulta Beauty, the nation’s largest beauty and cosmetics retailer, by replacing legacy systems and automating core functions without disrupting day-to-day operations. His efforts have reduced network outages 89% and cut purchase process time, allowing the company to handle more than 1,000 orders per minute without any downtime during peak holiday sales. Maresca also launched DARWIN, Ulta Beauty’s enterprise data platform, which provides a foundation for analytics, machine learning, and AI initiatives that now power everything from real-time product recommendations to replenishment reminders to AI-powered virtual try-ons. This tech-driven personalization has boosted revenue by over $126 million, the company says. Since 2021, Latha Maripuri has led global cybersecurity and privacy engineering across all of Uber’s businesses, including ride sharing, food delivery and healthcare. Her team deployed AI-based detection that increased the identification of potential cyber threats by over 140% compared to the prior year and substantially reduced the number of security incidents. She also implemented AI to protect the company’s databases and implemented automated reviews of product designs to vet security issues. Championing an AI-first defense strategy, she has pushed for the responsible and impactful usage of AI across the company. In the last four years, Sean McCormack has led the digital reinvention of North America’s largest school bus provider, which operates 46,000 vehicles across 42 U.S. states and 8 Canadian provinces. Under his leadership, First Student built an AI-powered platform that unites functions across operations, risk and finance to enable predictive analytics that the company uses to schedule vehicle maintenance and other operations, allowing bus drivers to efficiently bring 5.5 million students to their destinations daily. He also oversees electric vehicle-related IT initiatives through which he was able to secure $600 million in grants for sustainable transportation and reduced carbon emissions by 12,550 tons for the 2024 to 2025 school year. Modern fast-casual restaurants rely on robust data systems to enable information flow across locations. Beth McCormick has been integral to building them at Mediterranean-inspired chain CAVA, which generated $954.3 million in revenue across 367 restaurants in the 2024 fiscal year. Her work brought those locations’ combined data into a single, unified cloud-based platform to help restaurant managers make faster, more informed decisions–saving them hours per week. This transition will position the company to better scale new technology initiatives, including AI-enabled cameras that can relay information to chefs to help them better manage kitchens. When Sears Merritt joined MassMutual in 2013 as its lead data scientist, he was the only one. Eleven years later, he’s a member of the executive leadership team and works to embed data, machine learning, and AI across insurance operations. Merritt spearheaded MassMutual's digital wellness programs, which include multiple digital products such as online early cancer detection, incentive programs to encourage healthy lifestyle choices and an AI-driven mental health app. Since its launch in 2023, more than 900,000 customers have taken advantage of these programs. He’s also encouraging widespread AI use across the company, resulting in nearly 40% of MassMutual employees engaging with AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Summary, and GitHub Copilot on a regular basis, with a goal to grow that number to 50% by the end of 2025. As Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Jaime Montemayor has grown General Mill’s data science team 40-fold since 2018 and shifted the food manufacturer’s systems entirely to the cloud without business disruption, creating a connected framework with 96% data accuracy that can accelerate data and AI capabilities across the company. Even more impressively, the technology team automated more than 250,000 of a key customer’s orders by connecting General Mills’ logistics systems to the retailer’s platform. This move alone saved millions of dollars in transportation costs, eliminated 5,000 tons of carbon emissions, and cut order management time from 18 hours to just 30 minutes. For the past three years, Parag Parekh has worked to marry the physical products and experiences IKEA is known for with the power of digital and data. Under his leadership, IKEA has launched immersive, 3D kitchen planning software and AI-powered tools that help connect online and in-store experiences. Parekh also launched an employee-AI literacy initiative, which trained more than 30,000 employees on AI fundamentals, safety and applications. Additionally, his team deployed AI tools to reduce food waste in IKEA’s restaurants and optimize its delivery routes, which has helped the company meet its sustainability goals. Since becoming CTO of Block three years ago, Dhanji Prasanna has led the company’s technical evolution with mobile payments, the first version of the Cash App Card and Cash App banking products, cryptocurrency adoption and now artificial intelligence. Since getting promoted to the top spot two years ago, he’s overseen the development of “Goose,” one of the largest open-source frameworks for AI agents now used by thousands of engineers at companies like Databricks, Snowflake, Anthropic, and Stripe. Around two-thirds of Blocks’s more than 10,000 employees also use the tool, which the company estimates saves tens of thousands of manual hours each week. CIO Meerah Rajavel sees Palo Alto Networks as the cybersecurity company’s “first customer”––implementing transformations in its security posture and operations to enable it to better protect its customers. To that end, Rajavel has led a secure AI initiative with a focus on protecting AI data, models, apps and agents. She helped lead the deployment of a generative AI-powered Slack agent that helped replace 120 Slack channels full of “Does anyone know...?” questions to one formal channel directing employees to subject matter experts. She also implemented Panda AI, an internal IT and HR agent that now automates 70% of the company’s IT tickets. Neal Ramasamy leads Cognizant’s IT department, which comprises more than 3,500 people. Over the last five years, his team has deployed more than 150 AI features and 80 agents across the company and unified hundreds of enterprise apps into a searchable interface, acting as a central hub of tools and information for the company’s roughly 350,000 employees. His team has partnered with Microsoft and NVIDIA to design future-state roadmaps for Cognizant, and has trained hundreds of thousands of workers on responsible AI use. Now he’s set his sights on vibe coding, launching a company-wide initiative for employees to barnstorm new ideas, which more than 53,000 employees have participated in. In May 2024, Kellie Romack became ServiceNow’s CDIO after serving as senior vice president of digital experiences for more than two years. In that time, she’s increased the number of AI use cases across the organization from 15 to over 200, driving productivity in various ways. For example, AI now handles 89% of customer support requests, freeing up workers to handle more complex cases, which are now solved 50% faster. Security incidents are also handled more easily, HR processes are 20 times quicker than before, and the company’s go-to-market teams can build pitch decks and campaigns in a fraction of the time. The company estimates these AI integrations have brought in an additional $355 million annual value. Before joining ServiceNow, Romack spent more than 20 years leading digital technology at companies like Hilton and Walmart. In the last year, Leigh-Ann Russell has driven the company-wide training and adoption of BNY Mellon’s enterprise AI platform, Eliza, which employees use to implement AI in their everyday research and even to build custom agents. Under her leadership, more than 115 enterprise AI solutions are now in production, automating verification of financial information, speeding payment processing and tailoring lead recommendations for sales teams. Over 34% of employees use Eliza every day, thanks in part to over 26,000 training hours on learning programs Russell has deployed. BNY has also built over 100 AI “employees” that have autonomously written over 50,000 lines of code in a few months. Danielle Schmelkin became CIO of retail fashion brand Madewell back in 2019. Two years later, she was promoted to lead technology at parent company J.Crew Group, where she supports more than 12,000 employees globally. Since then, she’s modernized the company’s digital and enterprise platforms, launched mobile apps that have driven significant sales increases, and introduced an AI-powered search tool to its websites that has doubled engagement from customers. The company now credits this e-commerce ecosystem for more than half of its total revenue and says Schmelkin’s internal data science organization alone generates enough profit and cost savings to fund itself fully. Since 2018, Jude Schramm’s efforts to modernize outdated systems have helped Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank cut down on nearly $200 million in annual expenses. His team has simplified and standardized business processes to help more than 18,000 employees save unnecessary expenses and time. He also drives the bank’s mobile application, which was ranked by J.D. Power as first in customer satisfaction among regional mobile banking apps. To keep that rating, Schramm’s team constantly updates it. Last year alone, more than 750 updates were made to the app, most visibly with a security dashboard that helps prevent identity theft and flag suspicious activity. Since joining professional services firm Aon as COO in 2022, Mindy Simon has led the company’s technology arm, launching products to help clients mitigate risk. This year, she’s expanded the Climate Risk Monitor, a tool that helps businesses understand how extreme weather events–from floods to heatwaves–can affect their facilities, suppliers and operations. She led the migration of 80% of Aon’s workloads to the cloud in under two years, consolidating systems and saving the company $350 million. Finally, Simon led the creation of Aon’s Risk Analyzer suite, which helps clients assess and act on risk, providing business leaders with clear, data-backed insights they can use to make practical decisions. Launched in May 2024, the suite has expanded to include five tools, enabling risk managers to test different strategies. When Lea Sonderegger joined Austria-based luxury crystal glass manufacturer and designer Swarovski four years ago, she faced a huge challenge: future-proofing a 130-year-old brand weighed down with outdated IT systems. Her solution? The “Digital Backbone Renovation program,” which involves executing a comprehensive re-architecture of the company’s entire digital operating core to replace the complex legacy systems currently handling the company’s processes, go-to-market models and structures. The program has already successfully migrated thousands of infrastructure components and hundreds of platforms to the cloud, simplified the company’s application landscape and grown its digital offerings, which now account for 20% of Swarovski’s total top-line revenue. It is expected to be completed on time and on budget in 2026. Over the past two years, Saket Srivastava has launched a slew of AI projects across workplace management software company Asana. This includes AI Studio, a vibe coding tool that helps teams design AI-powered workflows, which surpassed $1 million in revenue within its first quarter on the market. His team has also deployed AI agents to help employees better manage workflows and automate tasks. He’s also driving Asana’s company-wide AI adoption. Asana employees can now expense their own ChatGPT Plus account, which has helped: daily AI usage amongst employees increased from 54% in May of this year to 70%, and the share of employees reporting significant productivity gains rose from 29% to 42% during the same time period. Most recently, the company has seen 9% year-over-year revenue growth and secured its largest deal ever, a $100 million-plus three-year contract renewal with one of the world’s largest employers. Since 2021, Nitin Tandon has driven innovation across asset manager Vanguard, which serves more than 50 million clients. Under his leadership, the company moved nearly 90% of its infrastructure to the cloud, and its Digital Advisor ranks as #1 robo-advisor by Morningstar thanks to its ease of use and automated features. His initiatives have delivered $500 million in realized value by helping power the company’s investment products and more personalized advice to customers, helping nudge $6.2 billion of its customers’ idle cash into active investments. He also helped engineers achieve a 27% improvement in coding time and achieve up to 15% overall productivity gains across the software development lifecycle. Atilla Tinic only joined Qualcomm 8 months ago, but he hit the ground running. He deployed a certificate program to ensure the company’s 50,000 employees across all functions gain skills to leverage AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and Qualcomm’s own custom AI models. Additionally, he led an upgrade of Qualcomm’s employee devices that resulted in deployment of over 15,000 PCs with five times faster boot times and battery life. These efforts have boosted employee satisfaction with IT by 10% and reduced the number of helpdesk tickets related to device performance by 40%. Tinic has also been driving the company’s end-to-end AI strategy, from building out the company’s datacenter infrastructure to embedding AI capabilities into company devices. Over the past two years, Sesh Tirumala has led one of the most complex technology transformations in Western Digital’s history: navigating the separation of its flash memory and solid-state drive arm into a new public company, SanDisk. The 18-month undertaking was completed ahead of schedule, under budget, without business disruption and with all of its IT-related transition service agreements or contracts completed within 12 months. Tirumala’s team also spearheaded the company’s AI adoption, with one its new digital assistants saving employees more than 50,000 hours of work less than a year after its launch, and another AI-powered search tool significantly reducing the number of support tickets. Rishi Tripathi has led a $140 million modernization initiative across the complex $11 billion Mount Sinai Health System in the last two years in his role as CTO & CISO. This operation has reduced Mount Sinai’s security vulnerabilities by 60% and incident response times by 45% through various AI-powered cybersecurity tools that prepare for and detect threats. He also helped deploy an AI enablement program that automates workflows across clinicians, researchers, and operational teams, while consolidating 50% of the company’s data centers and retiring over 200 legacy systems. These efforts ultimately drove $4 million in annual savings.
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The 42 Best Deals From REI’s 2025 Holiday SaleThe company that wants you to optoutside for Black Friday is having its sale early. Gear up for next year with these great deals on packs, sleeping bags, merino wool, and more.
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Automated Holiday Party Ideas (2025): Ninja, HP Sprocket, CricutI’m testing smart home gear and high-tech party gadgets at every holiday party I host and attend. Here’s how to automate the little things so you can actually enjoy the seasonal vibes this year.
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Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 word of the year captures an ‘unhealthy’ modern phenomenonCambridge Dictionary has named its word of the year for 2025, alighting on “parasocial,” used to describe a connection that people feel with someone they don’t know, or with an artificial intelligence.
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