On this episode of the Six Five Webcast: Infrastructure Matters, hosts Camberley Bates, Keith Townsend, and Dion Hinchcliffe share a conversation on the AI industry, its leadership, competitive landscape, and the infrastructural challenges and opportunities it presents.
Their discussion covers:
- The pivotal role of CEOs in steering their companies through AI transformation and the strategic importance of AI in future corporate success.
- The intense competition for both talent and data essential for creating powerful AI models, highlighting the efforts of giants like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic.
- Details about Project Stargate, a massive $500 billion endeavor by leading tech firms aimed at pioneering advanced AI models to ensure US competitiveness on the global stage.
- The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI as a significant rival to the dominance of US-based AI initiatives.
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Disclaimer: Six Five Webcast: Infrastructure Matters is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Camberley Bates: Good morning everyone. Welcome to Infrastructure Matters, episode 68 and I have got all of my buddies here again. Coming in from Chicago. Is there any cold up there, Mr. Keith?
Dion Hinchcliffe: Oh, it’s got to be cold up there.
Keith Townsend: You know what? I think yesterday we got up to a balmy 22 degrees, so we’re-
We broke zero for the first time in a while, so I’m fine.
Camberley Bates: And Dion, you’re in Washington, D.C. Isn’t it warming up or you missed the snow.
Dion Hinchcliffe: We got the polar vortex. We were two degrees yesterday, so yeah, it was cold.
Camberley Bates: Sweet, sweet. All right guys, we’ve got quite a week this week and there’s a lot of things that are going on, especially on the government, politics, all that stuff or whatever you want to call it. So we’re going to bring it back to kind of what this really means to our Infrastructure Matters cool guys that listen in to us because this is like, I learned so much from this podcast. I don’t know about you guys, but I do. So what we’re going to kick off with here is kind of the big stuff that started happening this week that Dion has been doing a lot of work with, and that is the CEO insights work that our Futurum has been doing along with Kearney that got released at Davos to great fanfare. And I guess you’ve been doing the roll around on all kinds of news and I saw our numbers all over the place, so it would be very congratulations on some great work. So why don’t you head in, tell us what this is all about and what the CEO should be thinking about and the CIO should be thinking about in Infrastructure Matters.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Absolutely. Well, thanks, Camberley. Yeah, so we released a major new report. It’s titled Are CEOs Ready to Seize AI’s Potential? And we sought to actually answer that question. And so it’s very interesting. We surveyed over 200 top CEOs. We interviewed over 20 of them as well to really get the color about what are they doing and AI is top of mind for the CEO. They see it as a major competitive issue. It can dramatically cut costs on one side and it can also create breakout products and services for their customers on the other side. So they both want to innovate and they want to cut costs. Broadly, we saw that they expect their businesses to be highly automated in three years. I talked to the CEO of one major audit company and he thinks the audit function is going to be replaced completely. That’s not going to be their core business going forward. They’re still going to sell that as the first thing they do, but then once the AI has all that data, then they can be advisors and they can go up the stack as we say, and do more strategic work consulting and helping them guide their business. That’s the kind of AI transformation that we’re seeing. So we saw that 59% of CEOs directly lead their organization’s AI strategy and we also found out that that’s not necessarily a good thing. The CEOs that stepped back after they set the mandate and say, “We need to rethink our business in terms of AI,” and then they stepped back, they had a higher success rate, a higher reported success rate.
Camberley Bates: And why is that? Did you-
Dion Hinchcliffe: They may not have the expertise to really figure out where the best place to apply AI is, so they’re not the subject matter experts even of parts of their business, never mind the AI piece. And so the ones that got overly involved in that reported less success. So that was one of the big insights that CEOs absolutely have the biggest voice and they can make it happen, but they shouldn’t go along and keep their hands on it too long. They constrain success.
Camberley Bates: That’s the total micromanagement stuff, right?
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.
Keith Townsend: Yeah. And it is really interesting, Dion. Both of us cover the SAPs and Oracles of the world and we see this not just in AI. We’ve seen this historically when it comes to implementing these company-wide initiatives such as ERP, that the success is not driven by the CEO, at least not managing the project, but typically by them sponsoring the project and giving that inferred power of change. And that’s probably the most indicative. Did you find any corollaries from kind of traditional enterprise IT projects, which I don’t know if I would call AI enterprise IT project because that’s-
Dion Hinchcliffe: No, that’s why we took the CIO, sorry, the CEO view. Normally we look at the CIO and what they’re doing, but we’re seeing that the CEO is the one that’s having to really drive that massive change across our organization. And they have the ear of the board the CIO often doesn’t have. And yes, this is coming in from a different angle than we often see it coming from and it’s this enterprise-wide transformation. It’s broadly happening. There was very few CEOs we talked to that aren’t planning to do something immediately or are already doing something big immediately. So that was interesting. And like you’d expect the biggest area where we’re seeing AI being rolled out right now is in customer experience, some aspect of it, and it’s a lot around customer support and customer service right now, but increasingly it’s going into marketing, sales, R&D. There was a lot of CEOs that are planning to formulate product. They want AI to formulate breakthrough products for them. They don’t think it’s ready yet, but as soon as it is, they’re going to pounce on that. So it’s fascinating. And go to Futurumgroup.com, go to the AI report portal and get yourself a copy.
Camberley Bates: Well, make sure to-
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I actually have it up now. It’s been up on my desktop for the past, since it was released and I’ve just been, you told me that the latter part, once you get past, this is an Infrastructure Matters podcast. So if you do get access to the report, take Dion’s advice that he gave to me, get past a few pages of fluff that us infrastructure folks don’t care about, quite frankly, and get to the latter parts. There’s great graphs, data points that infrastructure geeks will appreciate.
Camberley Bates: And it’s super reflective of what just happened this last week, which is the two different things. And we’re going to talk about that. One is the Stargate announcement and what that’s all about. And the other thing is this continuing discussion or announcements around building more data centers. And the latest one that I saw was Facebook talking about dropping in like 58 billion or something like that into whatever the big number was into, or maybe it was 60-something into data centers. And this is all this money getting dropped into this. It’s just enormous. It’s kind of head spinning, if you will.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Oh yeah. And that’s where the, a large percentage of infrastructure in the future is going to be out there in the cloud in these massive spans. So Satya Nadella said that he’s spending 80 billion this year alone just in 2025 on infrastructure. You just talked about Zuckerberg’s announcement and of course we have Project Stargate, which we’re about to talk about, and then we heard OpenAI stole Meta’s head of infrastructure and storage. I don’t know if you guys heard about that. So now they’re competing amongst themselves for people who are capable of building out these multi-million dollar, sorry, multi-million GPU compute cluster, right? So they’re training these models. It’s fascinating.
Keith Townsend: The battle for talent is not going to end. And just harking back a little bit to the CEO report, you talked about in the report the skills gap. And I think this is an indication specifically in our industry where you’re going to see competition for people who know how to not just implement the infrastructure and the technology but actually put it to work. And it’s going to be a fascinating-
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, I think there’s a difference between building a data center that can run a lot of different workloads through building a cluster, a mega-cluster that can train up a frontier model that has national and international competitive implications. So it’s a different level.
Camberley Bates: So it sounds like they’re going to start picking out of Lawrence Livermore, JPL, Fermilab, a few others around the world that they’ll probably be picking some people out of because as well as the guys from the public cloud, major cloud providers, so I would think that that’s kind of where the skills base is going to be coming from.
Keith Townsend: As we get into the big announcement, these resource restraints just not around hardware, this talent resource restraint. And the other resource restraint is data. And part of the big announcement was Oracle, we’ll get into that in detail, but where’s the data’s going to come from? We’ve already, I think Elon Musk has been quoted in saying,” we’ve basically already scraped all of the data on the internet for these models. Where’s the rest of the data going to come from to make better AI?” And I think that’s going to become a bigger challenge than the compute challenge.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It is, although the numbers are supposedly that only about two or 3% of enterprise data has been sucked into these models yet. And so I work with a lot of different professional associations and their CIOs. So like the American Geophysical Union, they’ve got an enormous amount of information, which is all behind a hundred years of research and research papers that are not publicly available. Of course you’d want that scientific knowledge in your foundation model if you can get it. But the Geophysical union is not going to just give that up. And so there’s a lot of deals now that have to be made to unlock all the rest of the data that’s behind these organizational boundaries.
Keith Townsend: This is part of the macro discussion around AI and AI models and the haves and have-nots. You’ll have the haves who can afford to build the compute to generate
Dion Hinchcliffe: And buy the data, both build the compute and buy all the data that your competitors don’t have yet.
Keith Townsend: And then you’ll have the have-nots that cannot access the data. So I think we’re going to see new service models come up. People are going to want to sell that capability. Anthropic and OpenAI won’t be able to go to these private organizations and get their data because it is the keys to their kingdom. I’ve talked to Fortune 50 companies who just simply said they will not use public cloud services for AI because the vast majority of their crown jewel data is within their four walls, and there’s no way they’re going to allow that data to be used for training for public models.
Camberley Bates: Absolutely. So do we want to skip over to Stargate and talk about what that’s all about?
Dion Hinchcliffe: I think that’s the biggest news of the week. Who wants to do that one?
Keith Townsend: So Dion, you wrote a whole research note on it, so I think you are the resident expert on all things Stargate as far as it goes.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, so let’s jump into it. So the big reveal in an AI this week was the announcement of Project Stargate. It’s a consortium of the top companies or some of the top companies in AI, and that’s the rub. It’s a bunch of companies that have come together. It includes OpenAI, obviously, kind of at the top. They’re the apex company and the one I think the most stand to benefit from all this. Microsoft and Oracle, which from an enterprise standpoint we’re very interested in their involvement. And we also have on a hardware level, we have NVIDIA and AMD from the hardware infrastructure piece, and they have with SoftBank, that’s the Japanese venture capital firm, come up with a $500 billion fund to create next generation AI frontier models. And to assure American competitiveness and leadership in AI for the foreseeable future is the stated goal of Project Stargate.
And there’s a lot of debate about whether that this is a good thing or a bad thing. They’re already starting on the first 10 data centers that are primarily going to be located down in Texas, and the intent is to build models at a level that no one else can by building training capabilities that can train and create all the deeper linkages between knowledge that a regular model can’t do in a year. It takes some of these models nearly a year to train on all their data, and so they can only go to a certain depth. If you have much more power, you should be able to squeeze, model your data. Now there’s a big debate about whether you can do that or not. If a larger parameter model that goes deeper actually creates better data, they believe that they can.
So Project Stargate is you got a tremendous amount of attention. I’ve never had so many immediate inquiries about a piece of news and in a regular climate, this might be viewed as creating a monopoly power, big vendors colluding and keeping the other ones out. So Meta is not inside the consortium, neither is Anthropic. These are arguably leaders in AI that are now because they’re not part of this and Musk has Grok as well. And he was very, very upset, had very negative things to say about the whole project, and so it’s very controversial in some circles, yet it stands to benefit United States and keep us in leadership because the gap is closer than we thought. We also learned something else, which we’ll get to in terms of there’s now international competition in AI.
Camberley Bates: So when we think about what Stargate is going to be creating here, it sounds like it’s a government initiative, but it’s not.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It’s not. Yeah.
Camberley Bates: Because it’s private money.
Dion Hinchcliffe: It’s supported by the government.
Camberley Bates: This was all done by great fanfare with Mr. Trump up there with these guys and saying, “We’re doing all this $500 billion,” whatever. So they’re creating this foundation model that will be used by the general public, the general company, all the companies that can license into it.
Dion Hinchcliffe: How many models they’ll create, who owns them or how the profits will be shared, I think those are things are up in the air right now. We don’t know. And often because there’s competing company, Microsoft and Oracle are competitors, that factor often makes these types of consortiums come apart or underperform so they don’t want to mix their stuff up with their competitors, so they won’t share their best information or best people or best knowledge or whatever. It’s very interesting.
Keith Townsend: Which has me asking the question, who has the most data? Who hosts the most data for customers, Microsoft or Oracle? It goes back to how these frontier models will be trained. Where is the additional data coming from? Again, the internet is big but not that big when it comes to how much private data that exists on tape, how much private data that exists in real-time ERP systems. How will Enterprise customers benefit from Stargate and will there be a monopoly in a sense that they don’t want to go down the route of VMware vis-a-vis Broadcom and be stuck and obligated to having their most critical business functions held by a monopoly of vendors. It is fascinating times and the implications are very deep. We’re in a very unknown, unknown state of affairs and water.
Camberley Bates: But the Oracle data, all that ERP data, the customer data, all those items, whether or not you’re talking about our data or the company’s data that’s up in Salesforce, company’s data that’s up in some ERP system, that is not owned by Oracle, Microsoft, either of them.
Dion Hinchcliffe: No, but there’s going to be a tremendous interest in figuring out how to incentivize the owners of that data to share it even anonymously. And so that’s to be the big debate. And of course there’ll be temptation to use it to use data shadows or digital exhaust as much as possible. I think that what we may see is maybe they need some of that massive compute to be able to create private models to say, “Look, we can go and trend on all your data with our data, but you’re going to have it in an entirely isolated cluster.”
Camberley Bates: So Dion, what do you mean by, what do you mean by digital exhaust? That’s a term that we haven’t used here, so if you can explain that.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah, so all people and all companies have what are called digital exhaust, they give off during their daily activities. They have log files and notifications and messages and information flows. All that’s collectively that comes out of a person or organization’s activities is called digital exhaust. And it’s actually very valuable because the more current a piece of information is more relevant, it tends to be. And so digital exhaust is the most current information about what a person or what an organization is doing in the digital world, and it’s everything that comes out of that. All the events that take place generate that digital exhaust. A lot of it’s not visible, but a lot of it actually is visible. You can script the public stuff. The question is how do you get the private digital exhaust?
Camberley Bates: Okay, cool. All right. So related to this topic is this DeepSeek frontier model from China that we’re hearing about, and frankly, it’s part of, I think one of the reasons why we do have Stargate is because our concern is China is advancing faster than we are and getting way out there in front because they don’t have any of these privacy issues that we have here, as we well talked about with the TikTok front. So let’s talk about this, the deep-seek frontier model from China. Who wants to take that?
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, I’ll do a brief overview of it and then you guys dive in. But yeah, this was a shot across the bow in that we’ve not seen internationally very many highly capable models. There’s been some, but they haven’t really been exposed to the benchmarks and proven themselves. You have to be able to be considered a capable model. You have to pass the standard benchmarks at a high level. Generative AI research is very advanced, so there’s very sophisticated benchmarks and leaderboards now that measure all the different dimensions of a model and scores it. And you can go to these leaderboards and see how they’re doing, and China hasn’t been there until this week. DeepSeek arrives and it goes near the top of the leaderboard. It’s competing with OpenAI’s best models at a benchmark level across all the dimensions. This is a big surprise because as much as they don’t have the privacy concerns, China also doesn’t really want to create models that have all the information. They don’t want their people to have all the information, and so it makes it difficult for them to pass the benchmarks when they have to censor large parts of their model because they don’t want to generate that information. Well, this model, they’ve either figured out how to get around that or they don’t care anymore. We don’t know. It’s brand new, so we’re still kicking the tires, but DeepSeek has put the American AI industry unnoticed that China is here, has closed the gap. I don’t think it was the reason why Project Stargate was announced, but it’s taken the edge off the announcement by showing that there is a threat and it’s coming, right? So that’s where we are.
Camberley Bates: So from a usability use of the DeepSeek frontier model, is this strictly going to be a Chinese model that only China will be using that model, or are some of the other countries going to be renting it much like we are doing with OpenAI and those kinds of things to be able to grab onto that model and do training with it?
Dion Hinchcliffe: I think it’s because it has to pass open benchmarks, I think it’s generally available. I haven’t seen how accessible, enterprises can actually license it or if it’s just used for researcher use. That’s often when a model first comes out, it’s only usable by researchers, but we’ll find out.
Camberley Bates: We’re going to see-
Keith Townsend: I think it highlights that this is not a black and white issue of U.S. regulations, bad Chinese unfiltered regulations good. It’s complicated, right? The Chinese have their geopolitical concerns, they have their own privacy concerns on what Chinese citizens are allowed to view. So that in a sense, handicaps their ability to create models. It is exceptionally difficult, more so than I understand to control what comes out of a model. You’ve seen the likes of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI fail at doing what we call responsible AI, and I’m sure the Chinese government with their constraints have much bigger challenges on how they, we have this, you call it the digital exhaust challenge. I haven’t really coined the term for it, but you have this law of unintended consequences when it comes to models. You create a whole new data source that you didn’t count on. So what happens when you feed all your organization’s data into a model that the users have rights to from an access control, they have rights to the individual data points, but they don’t have rights necessarily to the derivative. So when the model can now give them insights that they probably shouldn’t have, how do you control access to that data and those insights? So a big, big concern for enterprise is the lessons we’ll see from these geopolitical fights.
Camberley Bates: Well, how you control some of that insight piece of it is also having to do with your data management and how you’re allowing people to get access to that data management, which is now finally bubbling up and saying, “Okay, so this is a big thing.” I mean, this is a big thing in terms of how we are managing it, how we’re either masking the data, allowing people to access that data, use that data to train their models that they have internally.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, Dion, maybe me and you can do a deeper dive on what happens when the digital exhaust gets in the wrong hands. That can be, if I’m an administrator, I have access to the digital exhaust and now I feed that to, even if it’s an in-house model, I feed that to an on-prem model, what insights can I get about the organization that I probably shouldn’t have is really…
Camberley Bates: What do you start
Dion Hinchcliffe: I would like to do that. Well, this where filtration and AI safety is going to be so key, and it’s becoming really important to make sure models don’t emit things that they know because you can’t just use a scaffold and remove information from a model. It’s deeply trained in. It’s not something that you can go and delete. So you have to filter it. And how that’s done is getting better, but it’s still an art form.
Camberley Bates: So before we, we’re getting close to the half hour. I know Keith, we were putting on the spot this time. We have a bunch of other stuff we want to cover, but I don’t think we’re going to have time for it. And Keith, we wanted you to give your predictions since we both have had our time in this spotlight, but it’s all yours.
Keith Townsend: Yeah. So predictions and kind of reflection on the year. This was supposed to be the year that Broadcom lost what 30% of their VMware customers. It did not happen. Camberley, both me and you were at a backup vendors analyst session. They have pretty good purview over the VMware landscape, and I think they saw maybe a total reduction of maybe 3% to 5% of VMware workloads being backed up. So Broadcom has won, at least in the short term.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Well, it’s a proof point of how hard it is to get off of your cloud supplier if you’ve wired it deeply into your infrastructure for 15 years now.
Keith Townsend: Exactly.
Camberley Bates: Well, one of the things I had said that if we didn’t have this AI craze that’s going on, which is an absolute change in the company and their orchestration, et cetera, you might’ve taken the time to do a conversion.
Keith Townsend: You might have and I-
Camberley Bates: But, you have AI. You can’t afford to put skills on this.
Keith Townsend: And I think hitting you’re the setup for my first prediction, which is the relationship between AI and Enterprise IT is going to be complicated. The AI is not a IT initiative. It is, as Dion’s research has proven out, it is a board level initiative that IT will play a critical role in, and there is a obvious skills gap. There is also this tension between where do I put my smart people? I’m going to need my smartest, most talented folks from not just a technology perspective, but from a political and leadership perspective in IT to lead some of this AI driven change. Where are the budgets going to come from? Companies are very frustrated with the licensing models from the lights of Microsoft or the AI agents at $35 a pop. This is a productivity tool that the burden is falling on IT to find out where they’re going to get that additional $35 per user. I’m not revealing, I don’t think any trade secrets. Microsoft isn’t discounting their Microsoft Office 365 agent. I mean, not even the agents, just the O 65 stuff. So where are budgets going to land? It’s going to be a very difficult transition for enterprises to figure out where the budget for AI comes from. That’s going to be interesting.
Camberley Bates: So this sounds like Microsoft has taken a page out of Hock Tan’s book and said, “I’ve got them over a barrel here, so screw you. Sorry.”
Keith Townsend: Yeah. As part of our CIO, CTO forms, both me and Dion have talked to CTOs who have said, “We’re not buying it.” The options are from Salesforce to SAP to all of these companies embedding AI into their base solutions. The question is where is the value? Claude has a very different value prop than a Microsoft Office, and most CIOs and CTOs are taking a measured look. My son’s organization that he works for has given all of their organization access to Microsoft Office 365. And his reaction was, you know what? He’d rather have the $35 a month to go out and get his own AI tools or do whatever he would want to increase his productivity. So that’s kind of prediction one. Prediction two is we’re going to see more movement in private cloud. Part of this is driven by AI. The other part is driven by public cloud has just gotten old. It’s matured and enterprises have built applications in the public cloud 10, 15 years ago that they no longer touch. And we could easily run these always on or sometime on applications, on private infrastructure. And we’re going to see private cloud take a bigger chunk out of maybe not the innovation that happens in the public cloud, but we are going to see the optimization of cost happen when it comes to some of these older public cloud workloads. Does this mean that VMware Cloud Foundation wins? I don’t think so. It is complicated, and this is stuff that enterprises can do simply with Kubernetes. So those are pretty much my big focus.
Dion Hinchcliffe: And my CIO survey data backs you up, Keith. 71%, all-time high watermark by far of CIOs say they’ll reconsider where they run workloads this year.
Keith Townsend: Yeah, I saw that data point and I could not have shaken my head more vigorously. Yes, it’s what I’ve heard. It’s what I’ve seen, and it’s a short-term and the long term.
Camberley Bates: But at the same time, your other piece of data says they’re going to continue to invest in the public cloud.
Keith Townsend: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Camberley Bates: We have both of those tensions going on. Yeah.
Dion Hinchcliffe: Yeah. Public cloud’s not going away at all. It’s still going to keep growing, of course. It’s just that there’s now a new mix in the equation.
Camberley Bates: With $500 billion here, 65-
Dion Hinchcliffe: I know. A billion. It’s half a trillion dollars. That’s the biggest spend in infrastructure we’ve ever seen in the history of our industry.
Camberley Bates: What I love about this is that we’re seeing this go into maybe the inner parts of our country, the middle parts of our country. So that expansion, we’ll see the immigration from California and the coast into the middle of the country change things. Okay.
Keith Townsend: Somebody build a data center in Tennessee. Who knows?
Camberley Bates: I think there already are some. And with TVA and all their water.
Dion Hinchcliffe: That’s right.
Camberley Bates: Their water power there is going to be great. All right, guys, it has been a full 30 minutes that we have been chatting, and you know what? We have not even mentioned the word cyber security this time. Can you believe it?
Dion Hinchcliffe: Wow.
Camberley Bates: So thank you so very much for joining us, and we will see you next week.
Author Information
Camberley brings over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career has spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley has provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Keith Townsend is a technology management consultant with more than 20 years of related experience in designing, implementing, and managing data center technologies. His areas of expertise include virtualization, networking, and storage solutions for Fortune 500 organizations. He holds a BA in computing and an MS in information technology from DePaul University. He is the President of the CTO Advisor, part of The Futurum Group.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.