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

Jon McNeill, former Tesla president and COO of Lyft turned VC founder, shares a concise playbook for scaling companies 10X. He describes a five-step system that questions assumptions, deletes friction, speeds cycle time, treats feedback as fuel, and resists premature automation. Short, practical stories illuminate how teams can simplify processes, build urgency, and repeatable execution to drive hypergrowth.

Shobhit Varshney, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at Citi and former IBM data and AI leader, discusses re-engineering workflows before adding AI. He covers prioritizing high-value use cases, building a central AI platform with shared components, scaling from pilots with ROI accountability, fostering an AI-first culture, and embedding responsible AI and governance across the firm.

Alex Gutman, CTO at Gilbane who leads digital agility and AI in a 150-year construction firm. He explains shifting from siloed projects to client-aligned value streams. He discusses cross-functional learning loops, treating data as a trusted asset, pragmatic AI use cases like RFP acceleration, and designing flexible architecture for long-term differentiation.

Craig Cuyar, Global CIO of Omnicom who leads large-scale IT transformations, discusses scaling tech across a $25B marketing organization. He covers post-acquisition integration, centralizing capabilities while keeping business-aligned IT, and outsourcing non-core work. He also talks about using first-party data, AI and agentic workflows to transform marketing, plus role-based AI training for staff.

Eric Ries, entrepreneur, author of The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, discusses why successful companies lose their way. He explores corruption as a design problem rooted in governance, incentives, and metrics. He describes organizations as superorganisms with emergent ethos and highlights how short-term pressures and misused metrics warp behavior.

Sandhya Venkatachalam, Co-founder and General Partner at Axiom Partners and longtime AI product builder and investor. She explores AI shifting from tools to digital workers. She discusses building an AI-native venture firm, automating operations with agents, and where digital labor first takes hold in industries like construction, legal, and infrastructure.

Kellie Romack, Chief Digital Information Officer at ServiceNow who runs the company on its own platform, discusses scaling AI to drive measurable value. She describes Customer Zero practices, AI resolving up to 90% of some IT requests, governance and oversight at scale, workforce transformation through automation, and lessons for CIOs seeking ROI from AI investments.

Healthcare systems have traditionally been designed around individual encounters, not the patient journey. In this episode of Technovation, Peter High speaks with Rajan Mohan, Chief Marketing and Digital Experience Officer at Ascension Health, about how digital platforms, marketing strategy, and AI are reshaping how healthcare organizations engage patients. Drawing from leadership roles at Marriott International and Qatar Airways, Rajan explains how consumer-grade experience design can transform healthcare delivery. Key highlights include: Why healthcare must shift from encounters to coordinated patient journeys How marketing and digital teams can align around shared growth outcomes The role of AI in expanding healthcare capacity How personalization removes barriers to accessing care Why pricing transparency matters more than faster appointments

Stephen Witt, award-winning journalist and author of The Thinking Machine, tells Jensen Huang’s rise from near‑bankruptcy to GPU dominance. He explores NVIDIA’s brutal 70‑competitor fight, the strategic bet on CUDA and parallel computing, the 2012 AI breakthrough that changed everything, and why Huang’s near‑death mindset led to durable platform advantages and bold market choices.

Drew Pinto, EVP and Chief Revenue and Technology Officer at Marriott, leads digital commerce, revenue management, IT, data analytics, and AI. He explains merging revenue with technology, disciplined capital allocation for AI, shifting tech toward measurable commercial impact, treating many tech issues as data problems, and a new product operating model to break down silos.