How to think about AI strategy, according to Zoom CIO

How should CIOs plan out their AI strategy? One industry leader says it’s critical to think two or three years in advance—while also taking IT teams’ current bandwidth into consideration.

Gary Sorrentino, global CIO of Zoom, sat down with IT Brew to discuss how IT teams are handling the pressure to integrate AI into the modern tech stack. “I think we’re at this point right now where IT teams need to prove to the users that what I’m doing for you and what I’m enabling you to do is going to make your job better,” Sorrentino said. “They’re throwing a lot of AI, people are expecting results quicker than they’re happening.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How is Zoom prioritizing AI governance and communicating with employees about their use of AI?

AI is not a mandate. I think that’s where a lot of companies are failing. They’re mandating that people use something they don’t understand, and that’s going to be a rebellion…What we do is we spend time showing our employees, through employee groups, chat groups, things like that, the value. People will move to value; people will not move to features.

We are really trying to change the way that people work now, and in the future. If we can increase our employee experience, and I give you two hours extra off at night because you don’t have to write a meeting summary, [or] I give you a weekend back with your family because AI is handling some of those things that you would have been stuck with, and things like that.

We are seeing in some companies, certain people who are grasping and doing great, and certain people who are fighting it and not doing great because they look at it as a tech change. I tell all of our clients, AI is not a tech change, it is a change of the way people work. That’s how we get better adoption inside of Zoom.

Can you talk a little more about how you believe enterprise technology should work in the AI era? Right now, AI is all the rage, and with so many different options for tooling, how should enterprise be operating right now?

I don’t think we’re where we need to be in most enterprises, because AI feeds on data…Today, data is kept in different storehouses with different controls and different access. So, enterprises need to start looking at what their end result is and working backwards. I think they haven’t figured that out yet.

When I meet [other] CIOs, and they ask me, “How do you think we should roll out AI?” I go, “Where are you going?” They know where they’re going by Friday, but that doesn’t help their AI journey. They really do need to look a little further in the future, figure out what that end state is. How are people going to work two years from now, what are they going to have access to? What is going to be there and what’s going to be removed?

I feel like a lot of folks don’t really know what the next few years will bring, and it’s hard to plan for the future since, as AI has shown, anything can happen. Do you think with that advice, it’s hard to look ahead?

You always have to have a direction, otherwise you’re wandering out there, just buying technology, putting tools [out]. People don’t use AI for the sake of using AI, they use tools that work for them, and they’ll always use tools. The user will always figure out a way that works for them, and they will default to that. Now, once we know that, then it’s a matter of: it is up to us.

Do we ever know, rock-solid, [what] two to three years is going to look like? No, we have to have a journey. We have to have a journey and a path. Otherwise we’re just going to buy a lot of disconnected tools and spend a lot of people’s capital and spend a lot of people’s time that aren’t going to work together. We’re not going to be any better off, we’re going to be stuck with toggle tax for the next two to three years, and we shouldn’t do that.

I think a lot of times, my CIO brethren, they understand technology well. They don’t understand the business that they serve as well. And right now, that is the most important thing, because they are making a lot of the decisions.

So, they really need to sit down and figure out, how is the business going to change, along with, how is the technology going to improve and how do we bring the two together so that we reach our end goal together? Otherwise, you’re just moving forward without a plan.