Technovation with Peter High (CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO Interviews)

Metis Strategy

Twice-weekly conversations with top executives and thought leaders at the intersection of business, technology, and innovation. Each episode of Technovation explores the technology trends that are transforming business, and the leaders driving digital change inside their organizations. Produced by Metis Strategy and hosted by firm President Peter High, Technovation is the premier podcast for IT and technology professionals with the largest collection of interviews with elite CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs.

  1. 18h ago

    Not Just More Pilots: Shweta Gummidipudi on Scaling AI at Twilio

    Most companies can prove an AI use case works. Scaling it is where they stall. Shweta Gummidipudi, CIO at Twilio, has spent her first year building the infrastructure layer that makes scale possible: a single model gateway for routing and cost control, a shared library of agents and connectors, and inference budgets that keep business-unit builds inside enterprise guardrails. She also addresses two problems most governance conversations skip: agentic identity, which the industry has not solved, and agent sprawl, which she maps directly to the shadow IT problem CIOs spent the last decade managing. Alongside those structural challenges, she describes Twilio's Customer Zero program, where IT runs Twilio's own products in live workflows and converts that experience into reference architectures that enterprise customers adopt faster than vendor documentation alone. Key Highlights: Why a single model gateway is the prerequisite for moving from pilots to scale How Twilio structured a three-tier access model to prevent agent sprawl without blocking experimentation Why agent identity is categorically different from human identity and what that means for security How the Customer Zero program turns internal practitioner experience into customer reference architectures Why career-leveling guides need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than retitled for the AI era

  2. 3d ago

    Sunlife’s Laura Money on Designing AI Around People

    AI efficiency is not the destination. At Sunlife, it is the means to something harder to automate: meaningful human connection. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Laura Money, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Innovation Officer at Sunlife, about building AI around people rather than processes. Money joined Sunlife in 2020 with a mandate to connect technology strategy directly to business strategy. She describes a four-year AI adoption journey, from an internal GenAI chatbot in early 2023 to agentic systems governed by a shared control plane built with banking and telecom peers. Her core argument: adoption, not technology, is the real bottleneck, and AI’s value in financial services depends on what it frees people to do, not what it replaces. Key insights include: Designing AI agents around people and human decision-making Creating an “empathy dividend” by reducing administrative work Using AI to accelerate enterprise architecture and advisor workflows Evolving agile teams and technology operating models Collaborating on agent governance through an industry consortium This episode is sponsored by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. This episode is also sponsored by Blitzy: autonomous software development at enterprise scale.

  3. Oct 22

    Fix the Process Before the AI: Prakash Kota of UKG

    AI layered onto a broken process doesn’t fix the process; it just runs it faster. Prakash Kota spent his first 18 months at UKG consolidating two legacy companies into unified CRM, ERP, and data systems before any AI conversation began. Now, as Chief Transformation Officer, he is shifting the question from “what tools can we deploy?” to “what outcome are we trying to reach?” That discipline extends to the customer funnel, where AI-assembled signals travel with a prospect through every handoff, and to sales reps, where an autonomous assistant pushes pre-meeting briefs before a rep has to ask, reclaiming the 40–50% of call-prep time currently spent on research. Key Highlights: Why redesigning the process must come before choosing the technology How UKG unified two legacy companies’ systems as the foundation for AI-era work The shift from AI as a tool you pull from to an autonomous teammate that pushes the right information to you How AI-enriched signals travel with a prospect through every funnel handoff, making customers feel individually known Why UKG’s CEO holds a weekly cockpit review of the top 10 transformation programs, measured at the business-outcome level This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

  4. Oct 19

    AI Fluency Over AI Tools: Kristie Grinnell on Transforming TD SYNNEX

    The binding constraint on AI adoption is not access to tools. It is the organizational fear and mindset shift required to reimagine work entirely. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Kristie Grinnell, EVP and Chief Information Officer at TD SYNNEX, about building company-wide AI fluency across a global workforce of nearly 30,000 employees. Grinnell joined TD SYNNEX roughly two years ago and holds executive sponsorship of its AI fluency strategy alongside full IT operational scope. She describes how TD SYNNEX structured fluency at three tiers, required every ELT member to produce an AI plan, and built Fluidworks.ai as an internal factory to scale governed AI across the organization. Key Highlights: Why AI adoption fails as a change management problem before it fails as a technology problem How a tiered fluency certification gives every employee a concrete path to AI readiness Why every AI agent at TD SYNNEX must carry a registered identity and a named human owner How agentic SOC triage turned tier-1 analysts into threat hunters Why TD SYNNEX policy holds employees accountable for the AI outputs they use This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

  5. Oct 15

    No Pilot Graveyards: How Novant Health’s CAIO Turns AI Into Patient Outcomes

    Healthcare has accumulated friction that patients have come to accept as normal. Novant Health’s Chief AI Officer is systematically dismantling it. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Vijay Sankararaman, Chief AI Officer at Novant Health, about deploying AI across patient experience, clinical operations, and proactive population outreach at a system with 22-plus hospitals and 8 million annual patient encounters. Sankararaman came to healthcare from retail product and engineering leadership at Walmart and Lowe’s, and he brought a problem-first discipline with him: every AI initiative must justify the problem it solves before the technology is considered. His team has deployed a 24/7 surgical companion, a lung-cancer screening outreach program that contacted more than half of 20,000 at-risk patients in a fraction of the time human call programs managed, and a mammography scheduling agent that drove call abandonment to near zero.   Key Highlights: Why the hardest part of a CAIO’s job is saying no to AI proposals How a conversational AI agent reached thousands of at-risk lung-cancer patients human callers could not What 40% after-hours engagement reveals about suppressed patient demand Why the CEO’s frame on AI (technology feature vs. business reimagination) determines whether a CAIO role makes sense How Novant’s build/buy/co-develop architecture avoids vendor lock-in without slowing deployment This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

  6. Oct 12

    95% AI Adoption: How Zoetis Built a Model-Agnostic Platform That Stuck

    Most generative AI programs stall at the pilot stage. Zoetis reached 95% computer-based colleague adoption. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Keith Sarbaugh, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Zoetis, about how the world’s leading animal health company built an AI platform that colleagues actually use, and how Sarbaugh measures whether any of it is working. Sarbaugh spent over two decades in human pharmaceuticals at companies including Eli Lilly and Biogen before joining Zoetis in 2023. He now oversees IT, AI, data, cybersecurity, and global customer experience, and describes the role as more hybrid business-technology leader than traditional CIO. Key Highlights: Why Zoetis built a model-agnostic platform (Zen AI) with 10–11 LLMs rather than standardizing on one How a 350-person global Change Champion Network drove adoption faster than any top-down mandate What Sarbaugh’s Business Value Realization Framework requires teams to define before a project begins Where agentic AI earns its place: rules-based, high-value decisions like supply chain demand forecasting Why aggregating all customer touchpoints at 10x prior volume revealed service failures that NPS never could This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

  7. Oct 9

    Lior Susan on Why Now Is the Time to Build Industrial Giants

    The next generation of technology giants may not be built in software. They may be built in factories. In this episode of Technoventure, Peter High speaks with Lior Susan, Founder and Managing Partner of Eclipse, about why AI, robotics, and industrial innovation are transforming the economics of American manufacturing. Lior explains Eclipse’s five-forces framework for building industrial companies and why physical industries represent a significant opportunity for venture capital. They explore: How AI and robotics enable competitive domestic manufacturing Why industrial startups need operating expertise beyond capital The infrastructure opportunities emerging from AI’s energy and compute demands Why humanoid robotics may be getting ahead of practical applications How policy and national security are shaping industrial investment Listen to discover why Lior believes this is an extraordinary moment to build companies in the physical world.

  8. Oct 8

    How Mastercard Stopped $13B in Fraud With Real-Time AI

    Mastercard processes billions of transactions, and fraud doesn’t wait for rules-based systems to catch up. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Nirav Mehta, Chief Technology Officer at Mastercard Services, about how the company uses AI to score transactions in the milliseconds between a card tap and approval, and what it takes to build that kind of infrastructure at scale. Nirav leads engineering, analytics, and decisioning for Mastercard’s $14B Services business, which spans fraud prevention, threat intelligence, data commercialization, and emerging agentic commerce. He explains how Decision Intelligence Pro prevented roughly $13B in fraud in 2026 alone before the holiday season, why the company treats data unification as a use-case-first problem rather than an architecture mandate, and how agentic commerce today resembles the early web, competing standards, good intent, unresolved identity questions. He also makes the case that senior technology leaders need to stay hands-on, not just well-read. Key Highlights: Decision Intelligence Pro stopped approximately $13 billion in fraud in 2026 year-to-date by applying AI models in the milliseconds between card tap and transaction approval Mastercard’s Data Commercialization Platform reduced location-data staleness from 8-10 weeks to hours and cut processing time from multiple weeks to under 10 minutes Agentic commerce is still in early-standards chaos, Mehta compares it to the web in its first years, and Mastercard’s bet is that its payments trust transfers directly to machine-to-machine contexts GenAI is compressing engineering team size: a two-person pod plus ten AI agents is already viable for smaller programs, and the scarce skill is now systems thinking, not coding ability Mehta makes the case for hands-on experimentation over passive learning, logging 1-1.5 hours of personal vibe coding daily since December 2025 This episode is sponsored by Tines. Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

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Twice-weekly conversations with top executives and thought leaders at the intersection of business, technology, and innovation. Each episode of Technovation explores the technology trends that are transforming business, and the leaders driving digital change inside their organizations. Produced by Metis Strategy and hosted by firm President Peter High, Technovation is the premier podcast for IT and technology professionals with the largest collection of interviews with elite CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs.

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