How the wow factor drives innovation at Northeast Grocery

The AI revolution is rewriting the CIO playbook across industries, creating unprecedented opportunities for technology leaders to elevate their strategic impact. At Northeast Grocery, this shift has enabled a fundamental redistribution of responsibility for future readiness across the organization. No longer solely accountable for anticipating tomorrow’s tech needs, CIOs like Scott Kessler are now equipping business partners with AI capabilities that make envisioning the future a shared effort. The wow factor of AI isn’t just driving efficiency and productivity, it’s transforming CIOs from service providers to momentum creators who empower the entire business ecosystem.

What does transformation mean to the executive team at Northeast Grocery?

It’s a three-pronged effort. The first is to foster a culture of agility, collaboration, and AI-driven innovation, driven in part by our new Office of AI. The second, business process transformation, is to streamline workflows through automation, which is especially important as we merge two distinct organizations. And third, systems consolidation and modernization focuses on building a cloud-based, scalable infrastructure for integration speed, security, flexibility, and growth. We’re adopting best-in-class SaaS solutions, a next-generation data architecture, and AI-powered applications that improve decision-making, optimize operations, and unlock new revenue stream opportunities.

What are some examples of this strategy in action?

We’re piloting Simbe Robotics’ Tally robots, which improve on-shelf availability, pricing accuracy, promotional compliance, and supply chain operations. We’re also using gen AI in merchandising to evaluate trends, optimize pricing, improve promotional strategies, and enable dynamic decision-making. Our rollout of ChatGPT Enterprise to 250 business leaders has unlocked new ways to enhance productivity, from customer sentiment analysis and HR policy recommendations, to ad proofing and inventory shrink analysis. In addition, we’re also creating AI-powered store environments to transform the associate and customer experience through computer vision and mobility solutions.

Much of this work is driven by your Office of AI. How does that group work?

It’s cross-functional with new leaders rotating every six months. The Office determines where we make AI investments and how they fit into our corporate strategy, and the group evaluates use cases that drive value rather than chase a multitude that distracts the organization. The driver for the Office was the initial need for AI ethics policies, but it quickly expanded to aligning on the right tools and use cases. Most members of the group had experimented with AI tools, creating a launching pad for everything we wanted to do with AI. The concept was to create an environment where every level of the company can start to benefit from AI. It’s a bridging strategy to build our AI capacity during a heavy systems consolidation effort.

How does democratization fit into your strategy?

It breaks the mold of business partners bypassing IT to develop their own technology solutions, and turns this shadow IT into an advantage. We leverage AI democratization to shape a company culture that’s business-first, technology-enabled, and deeply integrated into Northeast Grocery’s mission. Our role is no longer to deliver technology; it’s to equip business leaders with the insights and confidence to make informed decisions. By enabling “DIY IT,” our teams can operate without the constraints of traditional workflows.

To drive democratization, we follow ECTERS, which is educate, coach, train the trainer, empower, reinforce, and support, which helps nurture and embed internal AI talent. For ChatGPT Enterprise, for example, we use town halls to educate employees about AI use cases, coached through the establishment of an early adopter AI Champions group, and provide power users with advanced training. For empowerment, we’ve introduced prompt engineering guides and access to an AI knowledge hub, and we reinforce training through AI forums about high-value use cases. We also provide support through dedicated AI phone-a-friend peer communities and office hours.

What is the role of the CIO in our age of AI?

A key part is to educate. We’re creating a new environment that empowers the business to leverage data better. These business discussions are much better if everyone understands how AI works, what’s possible, and how to apply a functional domain lens to a problem set in order to create solutions they never thought were possible, and in a relatively short period of time. Another part of the role is to drive momentum. Your new job is to create, support, and nurture that innovation wheel so as new AI tools come onto the market, you can rotate the wheel and keep the momentum going. With AI, we can now deliver the wow factor, which increases momentum and shows the power of the wheel to the entire enterprise. In IT, we’re no longer ticket-takers; we’re momentum creators. A third key aspect is being facilitators of the future. By democratizing AI innovation, IT can now share its responsibility to anticipate future customer behavior with the entire organization by bringing new tools and information to the business user, and then training them to leverage that power. This takes a different way of thinking than a traditional CIO role.