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

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:

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.

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:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

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:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

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:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

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:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

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.

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:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

Proving AI works was never the hard part. The hard part is industrializing it. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Dilip Venkatachari, Chief Information and Technology Officer at U.S. Bank, about what it actually takes to move from scattered AI experiments to a common platform with reusable components and measurable outcomes. Drawing from eight years leading technology at one of the country’s largest banks, Venkatachari explains how U.S. Bank treats model risk management and regulatory requirements as design parameters rather than obstacles, why the real technical challenge is plumbing rather than models, and how an internal AI marketplace uses social incentives to drive reuse without mandating it.

Key Highlights:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io

AI is reshaping every stage of pharmaceutical distribution, but only if the organization is built to absorb it.

In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Pawan Verma, Executive Vice President and Chief Data and Information Officer at Cencora, about leading technology and data strategy at one of the world’s largest healthcare companies ($320B+ in revenue, 5 million pharmaceuticals moving through its network daily).

Verma joined Cencora in 2024 after serving as Global CIO at MetLife, with earlier leadership at Foot Locker, Target, and Verizon, a cross-industry arc that shapes how he thinks about patient access, workforce transformation, and what AI can and cannot replace in leadership.

Key Highlights:

This episode is sponsored by Tines. This episode is presented by Tines: Freedom to build. Complete security. No compromises. Learn more at tines.io