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Are you one of the 180 million Americans estimated to have an Amazon Prime subscription? Or one of the 57 million who paid for an online news service last year? These familiar examples underscore the reality of customer experience (CX) in many industries today. Now increasingly delivered through digital channels, CX has been redefined by technology – making it a key part of the modern CIO’s mandate. The challenge for IT leaders is clear. They must ensure their digital infrastructure is set up to deliver the seamless, intelligent and hyper-personalized experience that customers expect. Otherwise, the impact on the business could be severe. CX’s commercial impact According to research by PwC, good CX has a tangible commercial impact and profoundly shapes people’s willingness to spend, stay loyal or switch to a competitor. Consumers are willing to pay a premium of up to 16% more for products or services with better CX. One-third of them will abandon a brand completely after a single negative interaction. With the growing significance of digital channels and the smart use of data for delivering great CX in today’s world, CIOs have understandably put this high up their priority list. “Customer experience is the cornerstone of digital transformation,” says Vipin Kalra, an expert in contact center technology with more than 20 years’ experience in the industry. “Successful digital transformation isn’t just about adopting new technology – it’s about elevating customer satisfaction, reducing friction, and making interactions more intuitive.” For Adobe’s Marie Knight, technology partnerships director, the CX challenge is evolving all the time. “We used to say that companies had to deliver the right message at the right time to their customers. But now there are so many digital channels, we talk about delivering the right message, at the right time, in the right place. And the place bit is becoming tricky.” Transformative shift A combination of the explosion in channels and technological tools is “blurring the lines between the CIO and CMO” in customer experience delivery, says Adobe’s Knight. “In the best organizations now, CIOs and CMOs work well together. AI is accelerating and complicating this, because content has to be secure and compliant as well as on-brand.” In Tata Communications’ work with customers in the US and around the world, “we’ve witnessed this transformative shift in CX up close,” says Raj Purkayastha, the company’s VP Head of Pre Sales and Strategy, Americas. “Many enterprises have worked hard to break down departmental silos, establish omnichannel offerings, and integrate multiple CX tools and partners into their digital environments,” Purkayastha continues. “That’s enabled them to create customer interactions that are increasingly contextual and trusted at scale.” But for too many organizations, this kind of positive outcome remains a distant dream – putting their commercial future at risk. The CX delivery gap In a study by Harvard Business Review, sponsored by Tata Communications, 94% of business leaders said that consistently delivering positive customer interactions is very important to business success in their industry. But a mere 38% said their organization is very successful at delivering them. It’s a frighteningly large gap between aspirations and reality. The causes of this giant delivery gap are both cultural and technological. Blamed the most are a lack of team collaboration (cited by 48% of business leaders) and a lack of the right talent (40%). But the challenge of siloed or disorganized customer data (39%) was also important, as was a lack of data analysis capability (39%) and a disparate set of tech tools used across the organization (35%). The CIO’s opportunity The Harvard Business Review findings serve to underscore the opportunity for CIOs. Modern software tools, especially AI-powered ones, should boost enterprises’ analytical capabilities substantially. Likewise, bringing multiple tools into a unified real-time platform can drastically enhance the value an organization gets from its piles of data. “These are precisely the kind of outcomes that Tata Communications’ Interaction Fabric was built to deliver,” highlights Purkayastha. “It helps CIOs with the essential changes they need to make so their digital infrastructure can meet customers’ modern expectations. Organizations can then enable interactions that are omni-channel, contextual and intelligent, providing a seamless experience for customers.” In all of these areas, CIOs can make the case for digital investments and infrastructure optimizations that tangibly benefit the bottom line. CX is more than just another IT initiative – it’s increasingly the competitive edge that defines market leaders. Driving that agenda forward is an exciting opportunity for CIOs to play a more central role in business success today. To learn more, visit Tata Communications’ website. source

When it comes to advanced degrees, only 30% of master’s degrees in engineering and computer sciences are awarded to women, dropping to 24% for doctoral degrees, according to Society of Women Engineers. And it’ll only become more difficult to foster gender diversity in the tech industry if colleges and universities aren’t also looking at the diversity, inclusion, and equity of their STEM degree programs. Once a diploma is earned, the real work begins, and here the numbers for women in tech are even more troubling. Only 38% of women who majored in computer science are working in the field compared to 53% of men, according to data from the National Science Foundation. This is a consistent trend dubbed a “leaky pipeline,” where it’s difficult to retain women in STEM jobs once they’ve graduated with a STEM degree. The IT leadership gap Women are in the minority at all of the Big Five major US tech firms, according to The World Bank. Of these high-profile tech companies, Amazon has the highest number of women employees at 45%, followed by Meta (37%), Apple (34%), Google (33%), and Microsoft (33%). Leadership numbers for these organizations are even lower, with women making up just 29%, 34%, 31%, 28%, and 26% at these organizations, respectively. Notably, none of these companies have ever had a female CEO and only around 9% of women hold positions such as CIO, CTO, IT manager, or technical team leader. source

SAP Security Note #3569602 covers a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in SAP Commerce, stemming from security bugs in the open-source library swagger-ui bundled with the widely used middleware. Tracked as CVE-2025-27434, the flawed explore feature of Swagger UI creates a potential mechanism for an unauthenticated attacker to inject malicious code from remote sources through a DOM-based XSS attack. Any potential victim would first need to be tricked into placing a malicious payload into an input field, potentially via social engineering trickery. If successful, attackers would be able to breach the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application — earning the vulnerability a high CVSS score of 8.8. source

According to consulting firm Korn Ferry,[1] the average CIO is in their role for just 4.6 years. That’s shorter than most of their boardroom peers and significantly less than CEOs’ average tenure of 6.9 years. Disheartening though this fact is, it may not come as a surprise to CIOs themselves, given the sky-high expectations they often have to meet and the relentless pressure inherent in their role. Many CIOs are hired with a critical mandate to modernize their organization’s digital foundations. But doing this successfully means fighting on multiple fronts at once: overhauling years of legacy technology, consolidating fragmented data, and battling entrenched ways of working. All while keeping the lights on today. Few C-suite peers are faced with such a daunting to-do list. Growing challenges If anything, this dynamic has got more challenging recently, according to Shane Guthrie, a VP at application delivery and security company F5. While there used to be “a healthy tension” between short- and long-term digital initiatives, he says, that’s been upended in the last few years by a massively accelerated pace of change driven by algorithms, LLMs and other new technologies. “In every single industry that I’ve looked at,” Guthrie notes, “innovation is threatening to outpace the long-term planning of most organizations.” What makes this harder to deal with is the novelty of the challenges IT leaders face. “With a massive shift towards digital and rapid developments in AI, we’re all operating without much precedent,” says Adobe’s technology partnerships director, Marie Knight. “There’s no training for this, so CIOs are writing the playbook as they go along.” The power of partnership So how can CIOs best navigate these enormous pressures? A key factor is working with an experienced and reliable partner, who can provide both the technical expertise and strategic guidance needed. With a partner like Tata Communications, CIOs can get help sequencing changes effectively, based on an understanding of their goals and the unique circumstances of their organization. “Partnership is the most important thing for our customers,” says Raj Purkayastha, VP Head of Pre Sales and Strategy, Americas at Tata Communications. “We find they don’t just want a vendor, they want a partner – someone who can come in and really help them achieve their objectives.” Personal chemistry and trust are important too. A good partner should offer a blend of support, mixing much-needed allyship with an external perspective that constructively challenges the CIO when appropriate. Tackling the low-hanging fruit Within their limited tenure, the reality is that a CIO probably only has a runway of two or three years to demonstrate progress. That’s not enough to complete a big transformation project, notes Tata Communications’ Purkayastha, so it’s important to ruthlessly prioritize. “Oftentimes, the key is going after low-hanging fruit that can make an outsized difference and set a clear foundation to build on in future activity,” Purkayastha says. This leads CIOs toward infrastructure, and specifically the network as the place where they can have the biggest impact quickly, creating the most value with the least disruption. Network enhancement can underpin broader transformation too, setting CIOs up for success over a longer timeframe. Phased approach “In my experience, the key to balancing legacy systems with new technologies lies in a strategic, phased approach,” confirms technology leader Vipin Kalra, who has worked in senior tech roles in the US, UK, India and Australia. Leading technology partners like Tata Communications help organizations optimize their network infrastructure, assessing their hyperconnected ecosystem, identifying prime candidates for transformation, and building a pragmatic roadmap that aligns with business objectives. This ultimately strengthens enterprises’ digital fabric and allows them to scale, adapt and compete on a global stage. “When you’re working on a transformation program, there are steps to it,” says Purkayastha. “Network transformation definitely needs to be top of the priority list, as this makes a big difference to customers and employees. With that step complete, it’s easier for CIOs to then turn toward tackling bigger challenges.” For CIOs racing against the clock to deliver results, the key lies in balancing vision with execution. By working with a trusted partner to stage transformational initiatives thoughtfully, they can secure the quick wins needed to maintain confidence while laying the groundwork for long-term digital evolution. To learn more, visit Tata Communications’ website. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ [1] Age and tenure in the C-Suite source

Could agentic AI accomplish that task? Could it work through complex, dynamic branch points, make autonomous decisions and act on them? That requires stringing logic together across thousands of decisions. I’ve spent more than 25 years working with machine learning and automation technology, and agentic AI is clearly a difficult problem to solve. A potential game-changer for and against fraud The more complicated a system is, the more vulnerable it is to attack. Agentic AI worries me on that front because fraudsters can use the technology to exploit weaknesses in security. Document verification, for instance, might seem straightforward, but it involves multiple steps, including image capture and data collection, behind the scenes. That creates a large surface area for fraudsters to probe with agentic AI, and they can do it far faster with that technology. source

ServiceNow today launched its newest Now Platform release, Yokohama, which doubles down on the company’s commitment to agentic AI. Building on its 2024 AI-driven enhancements, including the AI agents that made their debut in November 2024 in the Xanadu release, Yokohama includes teams of preconfigured AI agents that, ServiceNow said, “deliver productivity and predictable outcomes from day one, on a single platform.” These include: Security Operations (SecOps) expert AI agents to transform security operations by streamlining the entire incident lifecycle, eliminating repetitive tasks and empowering SecOps teams to focus on quickly stopping real threats. Autonomous change management AI agents that, ServiceNow said, “act like a seasoned change manager, instantly generating custom implementation, test, and backout plans by analyzing impact, historical data, and similar changes.” Proactive network test & repair AI agents thatoperate as AI-powered troubleshooters that automatically detect, diagnose, and resolve network issues before they impact performance. In addition, the new ServiceNow AI Agent Studio will allow no code, low code, and pro code developers to build, manage, and monitor their own AI agents, and to chain agents together to create automation workflows. Both it, and the previously announced AI Agent Orchestrator, are now generally available. source

Overview Bryan Tan – Partner (Entertainment and Media Group) at Reed Smith – talks about the role CIOs play in protecting their organisations from potential copyright infringement when using AI-generated content, how mature copyright laws are right now when it comes to AI, and more. Register Now source

Intel’s discrete GPU ambitions — especially in enterprise AI — have often appeared reactive rather than part of a clear strategic vision. The company entered the market late, facing Nvidia’s dominant CUDA ecosystem and AMD’s aggressive push into AI GPUs. “Tan’s background suggests he is unlikely to double down on discrete GPUs at all costs,” Singh said. “He understands that the real AI war is not just about GPUs, but about AI-first compute architectures. The companies that succeed in AI computing are those that embed AI capabilities across all their silicon, not just in a dedicated GPU line.” Intel has already integrated AI acceleration into its CPUs, a strategy Singh sees as Tan’s likely focus. Rather than chasing Nvidia, Intel may embed AI directly into CPUs and other processors, providing enterprises a scalable AI solution without requiring a full GPU redesign. Still, discrete GPUs are unlikely to vanish entirely. “Certain workloads will continue to demand dedicated AI processors, and Intel may still pursue this space,” Singh said. “But the difference under Tan will be an emphasis on AI computing as a whole, rather than a myopic race to compete with Nvidia in the GPU market alone.” Intel’s broader AI investments reflect this diversified approach. “Gaudi, as an example, is not a GPU,” said Paquet. “It is an AI accelerator, not a general-purpose GPU. Intel must continue developing processor types that offer growth opportunities, particularly in AI. On the PC side, Intel has GPUs and NPUs in its portfolio to support AI workloads.” What enterprise IT buyers can expect Analysts largely agree that Intel’s server roadmap is set through 2025, with no immediate changes expected under Tan. Major realignments at the server and large-die product level require longer timelines, making short-term shifts unlikely. source

The company introduces three Agentblazer Status levels to recognize the development of Agentforce skills, culminating in its Agentforce Specialist certification. source

Offering this kind of training to employees could be a recruiting advantage for companies. According to Korn Ferry’s global workforce survey of 10,000 professionals, released in late October, development opportunities were the fourth most important factor in accepting a new job offer, after flexible working hours, generous compensation, and job security. However, only 32% of companies say they plan to focus on upskilling current employees to address skill gaps. To help address the skills shortage, the public sector is also stepping up. For example, the District of Columbia has already invested $1.2 million in AI training programs for DC residents, including data science, Python, and other areas. And students don’t pay for these classes. “We pay people to go into these trainings, and then connect them with an internship or apprenticeship where for six months we pay their wages, and they get their experience,” says Unique Morris-Hughes, director of the Department of Employment Services for the District of Columbia. “When they complete the program, they’re ready to go right into the field.” The accelerating pace of change What makes gen AI different from other major tech revolutions is that the AI itself can be used to help meet the challenges it creates. “Unlike any other technology, you can talk to it like a person,” says Adam Paulisick, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “This single shift has led to more receptivity, adoption, and faster training than any other technology we have.” And the changes are cumulative and unpredictable, he adds. “In three to five years, people might just have an agent, and websites become unnecessary,” he says. “Those kinds of nonlinear changes are hard to understand right now.” source