Robert Cain isn’t a regular CIO. He’s a cool CIO.

At one point in his life, Cain considered the Delta Sky Club lounge his home because of how frequently he traveled for his career in the US Army. Now, he gives Florida the honor as he celebrates his two-year anniversary as CIO for Schneider Electric’s North American region, a title he told IT Brew that those in his close circle would never imagine him having.

“It’s like betting on the long shot in the Kentucky Derby if they would ever guess that I would become the CIO, considering where I’ve come from,” Cain said.

Those looking at Cain’s background won’t find traditional IT roles, such as a security operations center analyst, or security engineer. After receiving a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship in college, Cain jump-started his professional career in the Army, eventually climbing the ranks to serve as a lieutenant colonel.

“I was able to actually complete 20 years of service,” Cain said. “Twenty years, seven months, three days, and 14 hours, but who’s counting?”

Five years into serving as a commissioned active duty officer, Cain flipped the switch and joined the General Electric Company (GE), initially serving as a black belt quality leader before later transitioning into the company’s sales organization.

Read the rest here.—BM

Hospitals and other healthcare settings are relying on an OpenAI model named Whisper to automate transcriptions of recordings, despite a demonstrable risk the resulting text might contain errors or outright fabrications, the Associated Press reported.

OpenAI warns in its guidelines that Whisper should only be used “with caution in high-risk domains,” but that hasn’t stalled widespread adoption in the medical community. An AP investigation found some 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems across the US are using a tool by Nabla to transcribe notes, which itself is powered by Whisper.

The AP reported that interviews with “more than a dozen software engineers, developers, and academic researchers” showed Whisper regularly spits out error-laden text, even when using “well-recorded, short audio samples.” One University of Michigan researcher told the AP he had found hallucinations—incorrect, misleading, or made-up outputs resulting from flaws in an AI model or its training data—popped up in around 80% of town-hall recordings.

Others reported similarly high rates of errors in Whisper, with one machine-learning engineer reporting he found transcription errors in about half of its transcription of 100 hours of audio and another telling the AP errors were almost universal in an analysis of 26,000 Whisper transcripts.

Read more here.—TM

Big names came and went from big companies in October—a monster mash for the C-suite.

Here are four comings and goings you should know about.

Tesla CIO leaves company in advance of robotaxi launch

Nagesh Saldi left Tesla in early October, days before the company’s launch of its robotaxi vehicle. As Bloomberg reported, Saldi follows a chain of fellow executives leaving the company. After losing SVP Drew Baglino, government affairs head Rohan Patel, human resources executive Allie Arebalo, and Saldi, Tesla only has three executives remaining: CEO Elon Musk, CFO Vaibhav Taneja, and SVP of automotive Tom Zhu.

Saldi, who reported directly to Musk, served as CIO at Tesla for nearly six-and-a-half years. Prior to that, he spent over five years as VP of engineering at the company. Before Tesla, Saldi worked for Infosys and HP.

OpenAI snags new CISO from Palantir

When one door closes, another opens. In this case, it was Palantir’s loss that was OpenAI’s gain as Dane Stuckey moved CISO offices. The move was announced by Stuckey himself on his social media platforms, writing that he was excited “to help secure a future where AI benefits us all.”

Keep reading here.—EH