AI as a mindset: A growth guide for CIOs

AI is often used by enterprise leaders to improve efficiency and accelerate time to value. But what if CIOs viewed AI not just as a technology to do what they already do, faster, but as a philosophy to drive unprecedented levels of growth and innovation?

In this Q&A with TechTarget, Dave Wright, chief innovation officer at ServiceNow; and Brian Solis, head of global innovation at ServiceNow discuss how CIOs can use AI to open up new areas of growth.

The duo also authored Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies. You can read an excerpt from the book here after the Q&A, where Wright and Solis explain what they term an 'Infinite Mindset' and how it can lead to new revenue streams. 

Editor's note: This Q&A has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Your book focuses on the idea of the 'infinite company.' For readers who haven't encountered this concept before, can you explain what it is?

Dave Wright: What Brian and I wanted to do is ask the question, 'How can you take AI and not just do the things that you could do before -- such as reducing operational cost and deploying it to automate stuff -- but use it to free up time and resources to do new things in your company?'

Essentially, it's about looking at how you can constantly use this technology to make your company infinitely scalable and infinitely malleable. It's about using AI to not just do the things that you could do before, faster or more efficiently, but do something different.

A high-level example is this: I'm an auto parts manufacturer, and I decide to start a new division that makes airplane parts. How would I do that if I didn't have any resources? Where could I save costs with AI in the auto parts business, and then redeploy those resources to start the new airplane business unit?

Is it fair to say you view AI as a philosophy, not just a technology?

Brian Solis: We do believe this is less about technology and more of a leadership mindset opportunity. One of the things that we did is spend a lot of time studying 'AI natives' -- companies that are born with AI at the core.

Think about your frontier companies and frontier labs. They have the luxury -- and the burden, I should say -- of building the company with AI scale from the beginning. They have different measures, different economies of scale. They have what they call revenue per employee, which means that they're measuring based on outcomes versus efficiency and productivity.

The CEOs I spend time with -- in settings where they can have some very honest conversations -- will say in private, "This is the first time I have the job of having all of the decisions, and I don't know what to do." AI is the key for the curious and imaginative to reimagine their operating model. This philosophy is exactly why we wrote the book.

Are most organizations aware of this approach, or are they still using AI primarily to replicate manual tasks?

Wright: I would say they're broadly unaware. We think of it as mode one and mode two. Mode one is about cost savings, about reducing your bottom line. But mode two is about increasing your top line by doing something different. And those two things should happen at the same time. Mode one should drive mode two. Your savings should be reinvested in the company. I would say most people I speak to are firmly stuck in mode one.

Solis: Even in mode one, it's still not used to its maximum delivery of efficiency and productivity gains, mostly because AI is going into what we call a finite business. A finite business is a model that is largely based on yesterday's assumptions and yesterday's standards and measures. Technology has largely been positioned as a cost center within an organization. With mode two, you have an opportunity to drive growth with AI -- to do, as Dave said, what you couldn't do yesterday. But this is now a cost-reduction and growth story, which is different from what most decision-makers have faced.

When IKEA realized they could automate customer service, they took those customer service heads and built an interior design organization that actually ended up generating the company over 4% more revenue.

They found there were many interior design questions. So, they reskilled those human customer service representatives to handle questions the AI chatbot couldn't answer. And I think in the first year, that interior design service group generated a billion in net new revenue.

For CIOs dealing with legacy systems, what advice would you give them for moving beyond mode one?

Solis: If you think about how a CIO is measured for success today, there really is little room to say, "Well, what else can we do?" The mindset shift, the approach to driving growth, is always based on outcomes, which is what AI-native companies look at.

In the IKEA example, they did what most people would do and employed a chatbot to deflect calls and reduce costs. And that initiative was so successful that they deflected 47% of people needing to escalate toward a human being. They then asked, 'What questions are the other 53% asking? What couldn't we deflect?" It's about being open to having a philosophical conversation based on curiosity and imagination.

There's a lot of anxiety about AI displacing roles. Does framing it as a growth opportunity change that conversation?

Wright: I think that's one of the big problems at the moment, and Brian and I talk about this in the book. We call it the iteration track, where people fall into the routine of doing the same thing again and again. But ultimately, if you look at this in the most positive way -- and this is the whole point of the book -- this is ultimately a human story. It's not a technology story.

Although people say we can use AI agents to replace people, AI agents actually depend on people. This is about scaling up the concepts and dreams people have, so they can think about doing things differently in the company.

I read another story recently where Walmart was looking at how they could automate some tasks, and they were using the headcounts they freed up to actually train and recruit people to be delivery drone operators. But unless the company puts that vision out there -- that this is what we're going to do -- then I think there is a sense of fear for people that it's 'coming for my job'.

Given your ethos that AI should be a mindset, where does responsibility sit for owning it within an organization?

Solis: Ultimately, it's with the CEO. It's their responsibility to drive an enterprise-wide initiative to do things that were not possible before. In some places, it might be the CIO, but that means that it will only be limited to a vertical stack. If it's owned at the very top, we're looking at a more distributed, horizontal approach.

Wright: If you look at ServiceNow, the CEO's vision was this: We want to become the platform that people use to manage AI to transform the business. What he did was give a remit to all the departmental heads -- the CIO, CFO, CHRO, chief legal officer -- to use AI within the organization. The CIO was responsible for implementing AI solutions and maintaining AI models. The CHRO was responsible for enabling the workforce on AI. The chief product officer was tasked with how to use AI to increase the productivity of programmers -- not to replace the programmers, just to allow them to create more. The vision came from the top, but the ownership was then split across the entire organization. If you just give it to the CIO, you'll end up with an incredibly efficient internal support system, but you won't see AI permeate across the company.

Finally, what advice would you give to CIOs who feel overwhelmed by the pace of change?

Wright: At the moment, the AI story most people are telling is about technology replacing humans. But the more important story -- the one with much higher stakes -- is about leaders choosing a different type of future to build. That's what I hope people take away from this book: the realization that falling into the iteration trap may also make them irrelevant. Very efficient, but not very relevant to the market. This is their opportunity to really rethink the future that they're building.

Brian: It really is a reinvention of roles. The CIO has an opportunity here to elevate their position. CEOs mostly don't know the answer to the AI question, and they are looking, ironically, to things like AI to help them figure it out. The CIO has an opportunity to be a more strategic adviser, to have a foot in the operational side and also the business side. For those bold CIO leaders who want to reimagine the future, there has never been a moment like this.

The following is an excerpt from "Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today's Businesses into AI-Forward Companies":

Click to learn about the book.