A Small Step for the CIO, a Giant Leap for the Business

CIOs face two major challenges in business — finding and keeping skilled employees and using IT as a strategic asset to assist business goals — here is how to solve them. 

The challenges of a CIO 

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) role has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past few decades. In a digital-first world, CIOs have evolved from primarily technical positions to multifaceted business leaders tasked with shaping the strategic direction of modern enterprises. 

Therefore, to succeed, CIOs must be versatile, vigilant, and on the lookout for innovative ways to leverage emerging technologies to increase business productivity and performance. 

AI is one of those technologies that can transform aspects of your business from slow, manual, and expensive to lean, efficient, and valuable. Arguably, it’s a new paradigm shift … so, initiating its use could appear ‌daunting, complex, and costly,  but it doesn’t have to be. 

While AI’s impact can trigger a giant leap in productivity for your business, it remains simple for IT leaders and CIOs to deploy AI by adding it natively to existing tools. Once adopted, AI can help solve two of the biggest challenges CIOs face: finding and keeping skilled employees and using IT as a strategic asset to assist business goals. 

Finding and keeping skilled employees

As a CIO, you’re facing the tough task of hiring and keeping skilled employees in your business. Especially when people want more from their jobs in this era of hybrid work. Fortunately, AI can help.

Slack’s State of Work Report found that employees worldwide spend 32% of their time on performative work that doesn’t contribute to company and team goals. This is a motivation drain that you can eliminate. With AI you can automate workflows and streamline data analytics, giving employees an average of 3.6 hours back a week to focus on business-critical tasks. 

Additionally, using AI can help attract new employees by guaranteeing they’ve access to the most modern tools. And for existing employees, consistent exposure to the latest tech advancements keeps them agile and ready to adapt to ongoing evolutions in the digital landscape.

To empower your employees and help them get the most out of AI, you need comprehensive training programmes. These initiatives are designed to equip teams with new skills indispensable to their professional development — a critical focus point as only one in 10 UK workers feel they’ve the AI skills they need. 

Finding and retaining employees is but one half of the coin when considering the major challenges of CIOs. The other? Using IT as a strategic asset to assist in achieving business goals.

Using IT as a strategic asset to assist in business goals

With the digitalisation of so many processes in the modern workplace, the IT budget has swelled to cover devices, data storage, compliance, security, and wages for highly skilled employees. For this reason, IT is often seen as a necessary cost rather than a strategic asset to achieve business goals. AI provides the tools needed to align IT initiatives with business objectives that drive growth.

Take customer service, for example. Currently, 69% of service agents worldwide say balancing speed and quality is difficult. This is where AI can support. By leveraging data analytics and machine learning, you can offer personalised experiences, anticipate customer needs, and address customers proactively, ensuring satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. This should be a high priority when 72% of global customers say they’ll remain loyal to companies that provide faster service.

Data security and management have long been matters of compliance, a process of risk reduction. However, the advanced analytical abilities of AI have made these elements increasingly valuable — as agreed by 89% of UK analytics and IT leaders who say advances in AI make data management a higher priority. 

Using AI in this way needn’t be at odds with security protocols. By employing trusted AI, you can significantly bolster your cybersecurity efforts. This includes enhancing risk management, ensuring compliance, and fortifying overall security, which in turn, secures digital assets and data against evolving threats.

In the modern tech landscape, CIOs need to be versatile, vigilant, and on the lookout for innovative ways to leverage emerging technologies to help increase business productivity and performance. 

With AI, CIOs can unlock the possibilities of IT as a strategic asset to assist in business goals and retain employees. This approach will help overcome business challenges, chiefly those of retention and growth — bringing success in leaps and bounds to your organisation. 

Heathrow Airport is flying high, powered by trusted AI

In the digital-first world of today, Heathrow’s journey highlights how CIOs can leverage the capabilities of AI to overcome challenges and help shape the strategic direction of modern businesses.

Salesforce enabled Heathrow Airport to empower partners and employees by collating all enquiries, complaints, and opportunities into a single, centralised view. This enriched the digital experience for millions of customers through enhanced and more efficient customer service.

And, with stronger personalisation and deeper ecommerce integration, Heathrow increased its digital revenue by 30% and got one step closer to achieving its vision of giving passengers the best airport service in the world.

The impact of these innovations is clearly shown through the following key performance indicators:

• 4,000 questions answered by chatbots per month
• 450% increase in live chat usage
• 27% reduction in average call handling time
• 25% increase in digital channel share in four years
• 49% open rate for personalised customer emails

To read more about Heathrow’s journey, see here.