The gen AI at Siemens Mobility making IT more accessible

When Dilek Bocuk took over as CIO at Siemens Mobility in 2022, the IT of the mobility division had positioned itself as an internal service provider. “On one hand, this sounds good at first, because IT positions itself cost-consciously,” she says. “But on the other, it’s perceived as an external provider and not part of the business.”

And since this attitude was deeply rooted in the DNA of her department, Bocuk made it her mission to lure IT out of this mentality. “This is important, because only when you feel part of the business do you perceive a sense of duty and ownership,” she says.

Around the same time she became CIO, Open AI’s ChatGPT came onto the market and began to rapidly change the way IT was applied in companies. “The technology quickly gained a lot of attractiveness and encouragement from the company,” she says. “Above all, it stirred curiosity in the specialist departments, which has further fuelled my efforts to bring IT closer to the business.”

Since data is integral within the context of gen AI, IT almost automatically gained further importance for business. Previously, IT was the professional hardware and back-office operator that dealt with the hidden servers, networks, and core applications. “With gen AI, everyone has come into contact with IT, so it’s become tangible,” she adds. “Our goal is to be a present and active part of this development.”

But Bocuk isn’t interested in control. Instead, IT should guide and advise. “Not all challenges should be solved by gen AI because it doesn’t always make economic sense,” she says. “So we as a department must be able to decide together with the users which AI solutions have the potential to be helpful in the long term.”

Maintaining an eye level across the organization

In addition to technical know-how, IT leaders must also be able to see eye to eye across the business, which starts at top management.

“This is important so that we’re sought out and heard in this new environment,” says Bocuk. “To enable this, IT must speak a more accessible, and less technical language. We have to learn to inspire, engage people, and educate them about the pros and cons, not only those who are curious about gen AI, but those who may be wary of it,” she says.

Gen AI offers IT an opportunity to position itself as experts and enablers. “As a globally positioned IT department, we can scale quickly and thus make exciting use cases available to everyone in a maintainable and affordable way,” she adds. “Not every department or location has to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we can roll out a promising solution that was developed in Singapore, for example, or Spain, the US, or Germany.”

Not quite a complete solution

Despite all the enablement, it’s also important to manage expectations in the direction of top management, according to Bocuk. “Gen AI can’t solve all challenges, but there are many areas in which it can support human work in a meaningful way,” she says. “IT must help to convey where human knowledge and skills are still in demand, what isn’t yet possible with AI technologies, and what will be possible in the future. We need to be flexible.”

So proximity to users and constant communication are vital. It’s also important to hold workshops, webcasts, and training courses to actively pass on knowledge and make new tools known. “We have to find out at what level users are and go from there,” she says.

In this way, IT can break down inhibitions by showing practical and simple examples of how AI can make daily work easier. For example, IT at Siemens Mobility organized Learning Weeks together with the strategy department, where Bocuk and her team offered various slots on data analytics and AI. “There we explained to employees and managers how to use the technologies,” she says. “We then set up a general training program accessible to everyone, which we’re rolling out globally.”

In this way, IT at all levels can address their counterparts across the business. At the end of 2024, for instance, a leadership training session took place in which top management got to know different AI tools to create AI-based podcasts or social media posts. Such practical examples lower the inhibition threshold in dealing with tech, says Bocuk, who also has employees take care of user adoption at various locations, and accompanies users during introductions of new technologies and tools.

In September 2024, Microsoft Copilot was initially rolled out for some employees, and accompanied by training. “First we taught the basics of what was possible with such a license,” she says. “After colleagues gained some experience, the training came so they could adapt what they learned, experiment, and then expand in small steps.”

Now several months later, Bocuk’s team wants to conduct a satisfaction survey among these users. Questions will revolve around whether and in which topics the tool was useful. “In this way, we want to find out whether we’ve achieved what we wanted in terms of productivity, or whether it was more gamification,” she says. Finding out how the value contribution of these projects can be measured in the long term is still being worked on by her team.

Visibility for greater proximity to business

In two and a half years, Siemens Mobilityhas become more visible from a business perspective, says Bocuk, putting IT in greater focus for the entire workforce.

“Previously, it was mostly infrastructure and SAP issues that were only noticed when there was an incident,” she says. Since gen AI is very user-oriented, IT on the whole is becoming more transparent. But this also applies if IT isn’t able to provide information immediately, or if a solution takes longer.

The greater proximity to business also requires IT to adapt. “Especially in IT, it’s particularly important for many colleagues to be sure how technologies like AI can be used in business processes when advising employees,” she says. But gen AI is a technology that’s constantly evolving, which requires flexibility from users and supporters.

And SLA-based ticket processing has ensured a certain anonymity in IT, which means a protective system. “That doesn’t help with gen AI,” says Bocuk. “You have to interact humanly. You’re the contact person and no longer the clerk behind the screen. That’s why we train and develop our colleagues to deal with this much more planned role.”

On the journey together

According to Bocuk, in order to break down hurdles, it’s important to generate and communicate success stories together with employees from IT and business. This takes away inhibitions and fans enthusiasm.

“But we also have to manage expectations in the direction of our IT and business colleagues,” she adds. Gen AI is so new and developing so quickly that neither IT nor the departments have all the answers ready, so it must be developed together.

The workforce and the management level must be hands on in equal measure. IT-led experimentation opens up new use cases that demonstrate the possibilities of gen AI for business. “It’s my job to create these opportunities and reduce fears of contact,” Bocuk says.

Words and action in equal measure

Against this background, Bocuk puts transformation and change management at the top of her agenda as head of IT. “This has been an issue for years due to digitalization, but gen AI is accelerating the speed,” she says. It’s therefore increasingly important to keep up with developments and actively accompany the IT and business workforce through this change. “The days of looking at IT and business separately are long gone,” she adds. “I’m part of the business so I have to take on part of the responsibility.”

If resistance to this merger arises, it’s important to understand where it comes from. “This is often due to past experience with IT,” Bocuk says. “We have to address this openly in order to get rid of old resentments that no longer apply.” It helps to convince with results, of course, so cooperation with IT works consistently. “I can’t talk about agility in IT and then feedback from my team takes four weeks,” she adds. “We have to do what we say.”

Accordingly, Bocuk’s leadership team also serves as a collective role model. It has the task of helping to shape the transformation and showing vulnerability. “It’s important to admit not knowing something in response to an inquiry, but then to signal they’re on the journey as well to find out.”

Part of the transformation is to focus on how IT can help what lies ahead rather than dwell on the past. “We’re dealing with new players, circumstances have changed, and the pressure on the business has increased,” says Bocuk. “We should focus on shaping the future and gen AI opens up that new potential.”