Lead with IT

Kathryn Guarini

Lead with IT is a podcast about how technology shapes strategy, accelerates growth, and creates competitive advantage in every industry, at every scale. Hosted by Kathryn Guarini — technology executive, board director, educator, and PhD scientist — each episode features real conversations with leaders and innovators exploring what it means to put technology at the center of how organizations think, decide, and grow. Topics span the full journey: elevating technology into strategy, building trust by design, and making tech fluency a leadership imperative. The stories are specific, the takeaways are practical, and the perspective is clear: organizations that lead with IT set the pace. Those that don’t, fall behind.   Don’t just use IT. Lead with IT.

Episodes

  1. 15h ago

    AI Can Amplify, Unlock, And Reimagine Work | #3

    What if AI is not just a tool to make work faster, but a force that can change what work becomes? In this episode of Lead With IT, Kathryn Guarini explores the current state of artificial intelligence, the opportunities it creates, and the real challenges leaders need to take seriously. Kathryn brings multiple perspectives to the conversation: builder of AI tools, former IBM Global CIO, board director, educator, everyday AI user, and parent. She shares how her experience ranges from building AI capabilities earlier in her career to deploying AI at IBM scale for hundreds of thousands of employees across the world. The episode breaks down the evolution of AI from broad artificial intelligence to machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and agent AI. Kathryn explains how AI has moved from rule-following systems to models that can learn from observation and even learn by doing. She also addresses the concerns that come with this moment, including skepticism, ethics, privacy, intellectual property, job impact, bias, explainability, cybersecurity, energy usage, and the role of AI in education. While those concerns are real, Kathryn also points out that many of these problems are being actively addressed as quickly as they surface. The heart of the episode is Kathryn’s framework for how businesses can think about AI: amplify, unlock, and reimagine. AI can amplify human work by making existing tasks faster and more consistent. It can unlock possibilities humans could not reach on their own. And it can reimagine entire categories of work by changing what the work itself looks like. In this episode: ● Why AI creates both opportunity and concern ● Kathryn’s experience building and deploying AI ● How IBM used AI at global scale ● The difference between AI, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, and agent AI ● Why AI systems learning by doing changes the conversation ● The technical, ethical, and business challenges leaders need to watch ● Why AI concerns are being addressed in real time ● How AI can reimagine the future of work If you are a leader, builder, educator, board member, or business owner trying to understand where AI fits, this episode gives you a clear framework for thinking about the technology, its risks, and its potential. Connect with Kathryn Guarini and tune into more conversations on Lead With IT.

  2. Aug 19

    Trust By Design | #2

    What if trust is not something you fix after technology fails, but something you design into innovation from the start? In this episode of Lead With IT, Kathryn Guarini explores the idea of Trust by Design: four ways leaders, technologists, product managers, funders, users, and decision makers can build trustworthy innovation with intention. Kathryn explains why this matters now more than ever. Technology is being adopted faster than ever before, and when systems grow this quickly, failures can spread globally and instantly. The consequences are not just technical. They can affect real people, reputations, finances, operations, regulators, and entire businesses. She walks through major examples of trust failures, including the Boeing 737 Max crisis, the 23andMe data breach, the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster ticketing collapse, and the CrowdStrike outage. Each example shows what can happen when trust is treated as something to repair after the fact instead of something designed in from the beginning. Kathryn then shares three specific practices leaders can use to reduce failure and build trust earlier: pay your customers, break it before your users do, and open the black box. These practices are not abstract ideas. They are concrete ways to involve real users, stress-test systems before they fail publicly, and create transparency around how technology works. In this episode: ● Why trust must be designed from the start ● How fast technology adoption increases risk ● Why technology failures now spread globally and instantly ● What leaders can learn from Boeing, 23andMe, Ticketmaster, and CrowdStrike ● Why user insight needs to happen earlier and more often ● What “pay your customers” means in trustworthy innovation ● Why teams should break products before users do ● How Netflix’s Chaos Monkey changed reliability testing ● Why AI and technology need more transparency ● How “open the black box” can help users trust technology If you are building, funding, adopting, or overseeing technology, this episode is a reminder that trust is not optional. When you design trust in from the start, you do not just avoid failure. You build solutions people can believe in and count on. Connect with Kathryn Guarini and tune into more conversations on Lead With IT.

  3. Aug 13

    Welcome to Lead with IT | #1

    What if the biggest strategic advantage in your business is not just your product, your market, or your people, but how early technology shapes your decisions? In this first solo episode of Lead With IT, Kathryn Guarini introduces the philosophy behind the podcast and the leadership shift she believes every organization needs to make: technology can no longer be treated as a support function. It must be part of strategy from the beginning. Kathryn shares her background as a PhD scientist, technology executive, board director, and educator, with experience spanning research, product management, IT leadership, the C-suite, and the boardroom. Through that lens, she explains why every company today is, in some way, a technology company. From banking and retail to pharmaceuticals and small businesses, technology now shapes how companies find customers, serve needs, build products, run operations, and compete in the market. As AI, cloud systems, security tools, data, and automation become more embedded in every business, leaders have a choice: lead with IT or fall behind. Kathryn also shares examples from her work at IBM, including the massive IT separation behind the Kyndryl spin-off, and her board work with Regeneron, where technology plays a critical role in accelerating drug discovery, clinical trials, FDA approval, and patient impact. This episode is a call for leaders to stop thinking of IT as an order taker or back-office function and start using technology to define what the business can become. In this episode: ● Why every company is now a technology company ● What it means to lead with IT ● Why technology must shape strategy from the beginning ● How AI and digital systems are changing every industry ● Why IT cannot be treated as a back-office support function ● What Kathryn learned from leading technology at IBM ● How technology can create competitive advantage in biopharma ● Why future leaders need technology fluency If you are a CEO, board member, executive, founder, or emerging leader trying to understand how technology shapes growth, speed, trust, and competitive advantage, this episode will help you see why leading with IT is no longer optional. Connect with Kathryn Guarini and tune into more conversations on Lead With IT.

  • 3 Episodes

About

Lead with IT is a podcast about how technology shapes strategy, accelerates growth, and creates competitive advantage in every industry, at every scale. Hosted by Kathryn Guarini — technology executive, board director, educator, and PhD scientist — each episode features real conversations with leaders and innovators exploring what it means to put technology at the center of how organizations think, decide, and grow. Topics span the full journey: elevating technology into strategy, building trust by design, and making tech fluency a leadership imperative. The stories are specific, the takeaways are practical, and the perspective is clear: organizations that lead with IT set the pace. Those that don’t, fall behind.   Don’t just use IT. Lead with IT.

Information

  • Creator
    Kathryn Guarini
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Kathryn Guarini
  • Show Website
    Lead with IT