Legendary CIO Anil Cheriyan on delivering innovation that matters

Anil Cheriyan’s storied career spans multiple industries, including serving as EVP/CTO of strategy and technology at Cognizant, as the US Presidential Appointee in charge of Technology Transformation Services, and as Global CIO at SunTrust. Today, he develops and drives strategy as a board member, advisor, and investor.

Cheriyan joined me on a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast as part of our CIO legends series focusing on the wisdom and experience of these venerable technology executives. During the show, Cheriyan reflected on his decades-long career and the principles and philosophies he’s applied to successfully innovate, collaborate, and lead people and transformations.

Afterward, we spent some time discussing emerging technologies, including when to invest and when to take a wait-and-see approach, as well as Cheriyan’s advice to CIOs about balancing innovation with delivering on day-to-day requirements. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: What emerging technologies do you believe will have the most significant impact on businesses in the next five to ten years?

Anil Cheriyan: There’s a number of technologies affecting businesses right now, or that we’re hearing a lot about, and for many of them, I think it’s yet to be clearly viewed. I had dinner with a group of CIOs recently and asked them, ‘What do you think about blockchain, quantum, metaverse, and gen AI?’ With blockchain, they said, ‘Well, it’s interesting.’ Quantum, they started giggling. Metaverse, they were in tears laughing. But gen AI, they all said this is something real. That’s a clearer one.

IoT is going to be big. I think the whole data compute space is going to change a lot with Nvidia and the semiconductor space. Who would have thought that semiconductors would become this big thing. We were reaching the end of the road with Moore’s Law and the nano millimeters that we could get to, so this is really interesting. Semiconductors, gen AI, and the whole IoT space are going to be amazing.

Speaking of generative AI, you recently wrote an article for The Heller Report titled “4 Questions to Ask About GenAI” that I highly recommend. If you were an acting CIO right now, how would you be approaching gen AI?

The four questions I talk about in the article are around architecture, risk, talent, and expense. I’m really concerned about expense, because that’s going to skyrocket. So if there’s one thing I’d say CIOs need to do, it’s step up and own the change. And by that I don’t mean they need to have answers for everything. They don’t need to be the risk person. They don’t need to be the talent person. They don’t need to be the finance person or necessarily worry about the expenses. But they need to drive this and orchestrate this from a business perspective.

This is where they just need to take the leadership role and say, ‘Look, we are going to make this happen.’ Because if they don’t, the chief marketing officer or chief product officer or R&D person is going to then say, ‘Well, we’re already implementing all these things, and we’ve already hired Google or Amazon or whomever to make it happen. CIO, can you pay for it, or can you make sure we got the right infrastructures or the right data?’ You don’t want to be that person.

Dan Massey, chief enterprise operations and technology officer for Regions Bank, was curious about how you determine which emerging technologies to invest in, and when you think it makes more sense to take a wait-and-see approach.

That’s probably the hundred-billion-dollar question. But you can think about it as four layers: You’ve got the base infrastructure, or semiconductor layer, which is highly capital-intensive. Then you’ve got the data and LLMs, which takes a lot of investment to build multiple parameters of that. Then you’ve got data manipulation, or what we used to call the middleware layer, which is the next layer. And then you’ve got the industry-specific application layer, where real business change happens, such as in the healthcare payments or financial fraud, or whatever.

So if those are the four layers, if you’ve got a lot of capital, I’d spend time on the semiconductors side, because that’s really where a lot of money is. But that’s very capital-intensive. Most people don’t have that kind of capital.

On the LLM side, hyperscalers are the big guys and are going to own that space. Frankly, they’re investing a lot in it, and they’re going to suffer from their inability to recuperate the money that they’ve been investing in. And we’re going to see that — they’re going to raise their prices very soon, or they already have.

I think the real spend is going to be on industry-specific answers or domain-specific solutions. That’s where the answers are going to be when it comes to things like gen AI or any of these spaces. You’ve got to know the industry. And there are so many industry problems that need to be solved that can be solved with technology. If I didn’t have billions of dollars in capital, that’s what I’d work on. If you’re a bank, go do it for your bank. If you’re a software provider that is in the data space, go be industry specific. If you’re a services firm, go figure out the industry. That top layer — being industry specific — is where I’d spend the money now.

Longtime CIO Scott Case notes that over the course your career, you’ve focused on innovation and the importance of driving business value from that innovation. You and Scott worked together at SunTrust to set up an agile culture to drive a product mindset and a focus on speed to market. Can you talk about how that came about?

There are a lot of legacy environments in the consumer banking space, which makes it very difficult to make a lot of change. So we really needed to figure out, how do I make stuff happen fast and deliver on things fast? Scott and I created this innovation lab together to change the way in which we built systems and integrated with systems, using agile at scale.

It took a massive amount of change, and we had a leader in the consumer bank who was really also for it, and we would jointly work through a lot of very interesting things there. And we learned a lot of good things from that. It changes the way you think, from being application focused to being value stream focused and product focused.

There’s an issue we saw in the early days of IT that seems to be rearing its head again. Many CIOs are talking about how concerned they are that their organizations are becoming siloed, with people heads-down in their own domains. Why do you think we are having this issue again, and what would you do as a CIO to address it?

I think the complexity of the environments we are now dealing with is becoming so multidimensional. We used to talk about legacy environments and new technologies. But now you’ve got legacy, you’ve got legacy on-prem, you’ve got the cloud environments, and you’ve got so many different parts of the change that need to be dealt with. And then you’re layering on top of that gen AI, machine learning, data, and so on. You’ve got to have the specialization folks who can really implement each of those.

A lot of cybersecurity folks are deep in the cybersecurity space they know, whether it’s identity and access management or endpoint detection stuff. But they’re only effective if the IT group is doing all the things that they should be doing. So there are certain agents within your organization who need to take a cross-functional view, and cyber is one of them. PMOs traditionally, have been the other. I’d encourage people to create that cross-functional group that’s really going to drive the change and be more value stream or business focused.

KeyBank CIO Amy Brady has observed that, as tech leaders, we often struggle with how to balance innovation with being pragmatic, yet you seem to have always found that balance. How you were able to focus on taking advantage of emerging technologies while at the same time delivering day-to-day what was necessary for your industry?

If you have hundreds of outages every week and your systems are not being delivered on time, and you’ve got a team that’s not effective, you can talk until you’re blue in the face about being strategic and being innovative but you just don’t have the credibility anymore.

Your credibility as CIO is a bit like the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You’ve got to fix the basics. You’ve got to deliver on time, on budget. You’ve got to have those things. And you’ve got to have the innovation at the same time. You can’t do one or the other. If you’re just the basics guy, people are going to ignore you when it comes to all this new stuff. If you’re just the innovation guy and don’t have the basics down, you’ve got no credibility.

And innovation sometimes is hard to implement, because you can have the brightest of ideas, but integrating it into your release schedule and integrating it into what you need to start building the capabilities for what you’re building, that’s the hard part. You have to have that right balance across the two.

For more insights and advice from this CIO legend, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.