Digital Transformation at Philip Morris CXOTalk

#DigitalTransformation #CIO #ChiefDigitalOfficer

Philip Morris International is going through a digital transformation and wants to become a digital leader. The large tobacco company, with over $76 billion in revenue, believes the industry cannot continue with its current business model. Instead, the company has embraced technology to drive efficiency and change how it develops and markets new products.

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Read the complete transcript: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/digital-transformation-philip-morris

We speak with Michael Voegele, the company's Chief Digital & Information Officer to explore the technology and business dimensions of this significant business transformation. In this role, he serves as both Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information Officer.

Here are key topics we discuss:
-- About the CIO and Chief Digital Officer roles
-- Culture change and change agents
-- What are key skills that innovative CIOs must possess?
-- Digital transformation and customer-centricity
-- How to build a digital business?
-- Using data to become customer-centric?
-- Advice for Chief Information Officers
-- Is the digital transformation journey ever complete?

Michael Voegele became Chief Digital & Information Officer in March 2021. Mr. Voegele joined Philip Morris International in 2019 as Chief Technology Officer. Before joining PMI, he worked for Adidas from 2011 to 2018. There, he first served as Vice President, Group Functions, and Head of Enterprise Architecture and went on to become Senior Vice President, IT Sales. Since 2015, Mr. Voegele served as Global Chief Information Officer and was appointed to the core leadership team in January 2017.

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FROM THE EPISODE:
Digital transformation and customer-centricity

Michael Krigsman: Can you relate this back to PMI and to your work at PMI in terms of how you think about transformation and the connection back to customers and to the changes going on in society around you?

Michael Voegele: The more internal classic things of looking at this, so how do we simplify our legacy world? How do we standardize around the processes and maybe adjust or change the way we have been doing things for many, many years?

Then you talk about digitizing certain aspects of the business, but then also moving into automation, utilizing AI and ML to help us to do things more automated or even a better way in version and quality. Those things we can do in finance, you can do those things in P&C. You can do those things in the supply chain, in the manufacturing area.

When we talk about, for instance, a very simple example in our manufacturing environments, the manufacturing of our products is very sensitive to climate change within the manufacturing environment. How do we use AI and ML to optimize the quality of our products by providing the right conditions via the HVAC in those factories? Very simple examples how technology can help us to produce better products in a way that we have never been able to do it before because we have been monitoring more manually and adjusting the air conditions and the air humidity.

On the other side, with our smoke-free products, have now a little bit more freedom in the context of how we can create awareness about the category and the benefits of the category. Now we are moving, like many companies, more and more into a direct engagement with our consumers to show them the scientific substantiation behind it that our 500 scientists have created in our Neuchatel research facility.

We can show them how it impacts their personal health. We can actually go...