On the 32nd episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, the digital operations management platform. Eric is a longtime technology leader and has been the CIO at many notable companies throughout his career, including Informatica, DocuSign, and SurveyMonkey. In this conversation, Eric shares his thoughts about the impact of data strategy on AI adoption, transforming business operations with automation, and best practices for using generative AI in the enterprise.

Quick hits from Eric:

On questions to ask before approaching enterprise AI: “One, how are you using data to drive business impact. Two, what are very clear use cases that you could be focusing on around generative AI? There's a lot of excitement around generative AI because it's a very powerful, sophisticated set of solutions that are going to change not only the business world that we live in, it's going to change people's lives. But right now if you're not careful, you can get sucked into this situation where you're spending a lot of time and energy running around looking for a problem to solve.”

On the importance of promoting organizational buy-in to leverage AI: “Change is something that you just have to understand is a constant. The pace of technology change is fast. And now with more new technology coming out that companies are starting to get better at managing and leveraging automation and AI and some of these other tools. You have to sit down with the organization. You have got to talk about what kind of change that is going to be in the organization and make sure the executive team is on board with that. If you can't get that done, then you're not going to go very far on that sort of transformation.”

On potential limitations of AI interacting with legacy code: “There is this belief that AI is going to transform. And there are elements of it for sure, but I don't know how great AI is at taking a bunch of old legacy code and untangling that. This gets back into the whole problem where we have got to be careful not to assume that generative AI is the utopia, because there are still a lot of limitations to it.”

Recent Book Recommendation: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

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Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.