$2.7 trillion and the process is still broken
Powered by Single Fin
Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!
In this edition:
Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, on why your issue is probably your process, not your tool
Why 72% of AI decision-makers say failures start with poor data, not poor models
The Agile cautionary tale, and why AI is walking the same path
Stay sharp. Stay ahead.
Your Problem Is Probably Your Process, Not Another Tool
When I asked Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, how she positions a security budget to the board, she started somewhere I did not expect. Not with the pitch, but with a warning about the instinct most of us have when we walk into a new environment and see a gap.
Roberta credits her military background for teaching her to operate on a light budget and treat anything extra as a bonus. That discipline shapes how she diagnoses problems. The mistake she sees leaders make over and over is reaching for a purchase order first.
"A lot of times you really don't need this next new thing. And you have to ask yourself, do we really need this new thing or do we need to be more efficient with what we have?"
She is not anti-tool. She loves tools, and she was clear you need your GRC platform, your SIEM, your vulnerability management. The problem is using a tool to paper over something a tool cannot fix.
"More than likely, your issue is your process and not your tool."
The failure mode is a stack full of software sitting on top of broken process. As she put it, people throw a tool at a problem, end up with a pile of tools, and still have the same messed-up process underneath because they never fixed it. Band-aids on a gaping wound.
So her first move coming into a role is not shopping. It is looking at process. And the timing pressure only makes the discipline more important, because the pace of new tools is relentless.
"There's going to be new tools coming out every single day, every week."
The right response to that firehose is not to spend your time evaluating all of it. It is to stay anchored on what matters to the business and resist the pull to investigate every shiny new option.
The takeaway for technology leaders: before you write the check, ask whether the gap is a capability you are missing or a process you have not fixed. New tools will keep arriving faster than you can assess them, so let business impact, not novelty, decide what earns a place in your stack.
Your AI Agents Are Only as Smart as the Data Underneath
A new Collibra study conducted by Harris Poll puts a number on what a lot of us have been seeing firsthand. When enterprise AI initiatives fall short, 72% of AI decision-makers say the root cause is a poor data foundation. Not the model. Not the vendor. The data underneath.
The survey of 300 data and AI decision-makers found that 87% of teams are regularly checking that the context available for AI agents remains accurate and current. More than half said employees spend hours manually reviewing and correcting AI agent outputs. That is the opposite of what these tools were supposed to deliver.
The structural problem is that enterprise data was built for humans reading dashboards and running analyses. Agents do not work that way. When a definition is ambiguous or context is missing, an agent will still produce an answer and act on it. So the work is not just cleaning up more data. It is making context available in a form machines can understand and use.
This is the part that should worry you: 53% of decision-makers are now moving their AI function's reporting line closer to the data organization. That is a structural admission that we built AI on top of a foundation that was never designed for it. If you are a CIO evaluating your next AI investment, start with the data layer. No agent is smarter than the data it reads. And if your team is spending hours manually checking agent outputs, you do not have an AI deployment. You have a very expensive intern.
— Zack Tembi
AI is retracing the Agile mistake, and the blast radius is bigger
A new CIO Dive opinion piece draws a line between AI adoption and the Agile movement, and the comparison should make every technology leader uncomfortable. Agile started as a revolt against processes that smothered the work. It delivered real results. And then it got hijacked by frameworks, certifications, and coaches who had never shipped anything. Twenty years later, "we're Agile" tells you nothing about whether a team can actually deliver.
AI is now walking the same path. But the blast radius is bigger, because it reaches every job built on knowledge work. The core failure mode is the same: bolting a model onto a process built for humans doing every step by hand. That just makes a broken workflow slightly faster.
The teams getting real leverage are tearing the workflow down to its purpose and rebuilding it around what the tool can now do, removing handoffs, review layers, and steps that only existed because the old way was done at a human's pace. Just 39% of organizations report any EBIT impact from AI, according to McKinsey, and most of them under 5%.
I lived through the Agile wave. I watched organizations spend millions on certifications and ceremonies while the actual delivery stayed the same. The lesson was simple: if you rename the meetings but do not change the work, you get the same result with new vocabulary. AI is doing this right now. The companies winning are the ones redesigning the work, not decorating it. If your AI initiative is a layer on top of an untouched process, you are building Agile 2.0, and you already know how that ended.
— Zack Tembi
💡 CIO Spotlights
Dr. Ashish Shrivastava, Chief Information Officer, Radico Khaitan
Named CIO of Radico Khaitan, the Indian spirits and liquor company, to lead AI-driven digital transformation, enterprise technology strategy, and digital innovation
Brings more than 25 years of technology leadership experience spanning banking, retail, manufacturing, media, telecom, government, and technology services
Previously served as Head of Technology and Business Head of Digital Engineering at Financial Software & Systems (FSS), overseeing a hosted business valued at more than ₹500 crore and a 600-member banking transformation service
Earlier career includes CIO roles at Allied Blenders & Distillers and CMS Infosystems, and enterprise technology leadership at Reliance Retail covering SAP, AI/RPA, IoT, and cybersecurity across 20,000+ retail outlets
Also served as Chief Technology Officer at the Punjab State E-Governance Society, leading digital transformation across 30 million citizens, 800 services, and 100 applications
