Host Ariel Jalali, CEO and CAIO of Paragon, sits down with Ron Kim, former Global CTO at Merck and founder of Ron Kim Advisory, to tackle the question every C-suite leader is asking: is your organization actually ready for AI, and is AI actually ready for you?
Ron brings 35 years of hard-won perspective from global enterprise technology. He recently completed a five-year tenure as Global CTO at Merck, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and has previously served as CIO at Exelon Utilities and McAfee. He spent five years advising TPG's $120B private equity portfolio on technology strategy and due diligence, began his career at Accenture rising to Partner and Managing Director, and now offers independent executive AI and fractional CIO/CTO advisory services.
Ariel and Ron cut through the noise on the questions every enterprise leader is wrestling with right now. What does AI and agentic AI actually mean in practice? How do you tell real transformation from shelfware? How should a CIO get control of shadow AI and tool sprawl? And why isn't the first question always whether a process should even exist before you automate it?
The conversation goes deeper into the trust gap between AI startups and the enterprise, the process debt elephant that derails most AI initiatives, and real-world use cases and cautionary tales from healthcare, life sciences and pharma. Ron also shares his unfiltered take on whether the major AI model vendors are truly ready for the enterprise.
The episode closes with a direct challenge to leadership teams: AI transformation is not a CIO problem. It is a culture and change management problem, and the bottleneck, as always, is people.
For C-suite executives, PE operators evaluating portco AI readiness, and technology leaders driving AI transformation and automation, this episode delivers the practical, unfiltered intelligence you need.
Learn more about Paragon: paragoncto.com Learn more about Ron Kim Advisory: ronkimadvisory.com
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