Breaking Silos for Enterprise Cohesion.

Prashant’s concern about “use case tourism” is that a collection of small experiments can keep an organization busy without changing much about its performance.

His starting point is a business process and the value that improving that process can create. Can it help generate revenue? Save time? Make operations run more smoothly? From there, leaders can determine where AI belongs and how deeply it needs to be integrated.

He describes work to connect AI interfaces with Salesforce so employees can interact with the system through AI tools. The purpose is to make the technology fit more naturally into the work people need to do.

That is also why he puts so much emphasis on an organization’s own information and ways of operating. Choosing an AI model is only one decision. Understanding what the model needs to know about the business is another.

“Look at the company’s operational context and data context,” he says.

The questions become specific: What information do employees need? What are they trying to accomplish? Where would intelligence built into the process help them take the next step?

Prashant does not expect organizations to have pristine data across systems built over many years. Nor does he believe they should wait for a complete overhaul before moving ahead with AI.

His approach is “fit for purpose.”

Choose a business process. Identify the data it requires. Assign someone responsibility for that data, and improve it as the work progresses.

This gives organizations a manageable place to begin. Rather than attempting to repair an entire data warehouse before delivering anything useful, they can improve the information needed for a particular process, learn from the implementation and move to the next area.

“Start small, get one process cleaned up, and then go to the other one.”

Ownership and governance remain part of that work. Moving incrementally gives teams a way to make progress while improving the foundations on which AI depends.

Marketing, finance and business teams need to be able to work from information they understand in the same way. Otherwise, connecting their systems will only take the organization so far. The CIO can help create that common foundation by bringing technology, data and processes into a unified view.

“The CIO can break the silos,” he says. “And when the silos are broken, it’s a one unified organization.”

Prashant uses an aviation analogy to describe the CIO’s changing role. If a business leader is the pilot, the CIO is the copilot, helping navigate revenue growth and operational excellence.

What business leaders need is a technology partner who understands what they are trying to accomplish on the largest strategic level. That means helping leaders identify opportunities. It also means making operations more resilient and addressing the processes and technical limitations that slow the business down.

The role also comes with an unusual vantage point. Technology teams work across systems, data and business processes, putting them in a position to see connections that individual functions may miss. Prashant sees that position as central to helping the enterprise work together.

Ask Prashant why technology investments fail to produce their expected value, and he returns to people.

“Adoption is not just driven by technology,” he says. “It’s driven by human behaviors and also by business processes.”

A sophisticated system will struggle if the process underneath it is broken or the people expected to use it are unprepared. Adding technology can make those problems move faster.

That is why Prashant wants change management discussed at the beginning of a transformation. Are people ready to change how they work? Are the processes ready to change? How will employees respond?

He understands why technology spending can be easier to approve. Its cost appears on an invoice. The work of changing behavior is less tangible, even though the return on the technology depends on it.

His preference is to introduce changes incrementally, giving people time to adjust and teams room to learn.

“Don’t do a big bang approach,” he says.

Budgets and timelines still matter. But he also wants to know whether a system has become part of the business process and whether the people using it see value.

The same business perspective shapes Prashant’s approach to technical debt.

“I strongly feel that technical debt should not be measured by the age of the system,” he says.

An older system does not automatically need replacing. The more useful question is whether it is holding the business back. Does it make change difficult? Slow down work? Prevent the organization from doing something valuable?

AI needs to be examined through that lens, too. Without governance, it can introduce poorly designed connections, data exposure and tools outside the organization’s oversight—adding to the problems leaders hoped it would solve.

For Prashant, the test of a technology investment ultimately belongs with the business sponsor and the people doing the work. Can they validate the value it provides?

That asks more of CIOs than delivering a project on time and within budget. It asks them to understand what changes after delivery—and to stay involved in making those changes work.

“Change management is a must for any project if we want to get a business value out of it.”