CIO 100 Award winners drive business results with IT

“This is a new way to interact with the web and search. It’s not just returning a list of webpages, but it’s [giving users] richer content, and the content that’s produced through the generative AI search results allows [users] to go to parts of the web property that is the genesis of that information so they can dig deeper if they want,” says Michael A. Pfeffer, SVP and chief information and digital officer, as well as associate dean and clinical professor of medicine. “It’s an exciting new way of finding information.”

Moderna’s own gen AI product democratizes use of AI across company

Organization: Moderna

Project: mChat (Moderna Chat)

IT leader: Brad Miller, CIO

Moderna quickly seized on the potential of generative AI with its creation mChat. Shorthand for Moderna Chat, mChat is a home-built generative AI client for large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Moderna launched mChat to offer employees access to gen AI models in a highly secure, private, user-friendly interface.

From the start of this initiative, Moderna’s IT leadership recognized the privacy concerns associated with using an external platform such as ChatGPT. So CIO Brad Miller along with head of AI engineering Andrew Giessel and others opted to create an alpha application using OpenAI’s backend API, with a zero data retention architecture to protect the company’s data.

This enabled the team to expose the technology to a small group of senior leaders to test. Following a strict data control and security review and that successful test with senior leaders, the company decided to roll out mChat to all employees just six weeks later.

To help ensure adoption, the company used its AI Academy and created a transformation team to train employees on its use and potential. Such efforts paid off, as nearly half of Moderna employees were actively using mChat within two months after its launch, and nearly 65% just months later. Moreover, that 65% represented nearly all employees who had access to devices that could use mChat.

Moderna, which continues to evolve the application, considers mChat transformational.

“Embedding AI into your workforce by upskilling all employees can lead to a dramatic increase in the value each employee brings, while allowing people to focus on the work that really matters, massively improving productivity,” says Brice Challamel, VP of AI products and platforms at Moderna.

Data transformation gives Neighborly competitive advantage

Organization: Neighborly

Project: A New Analytics Era — a Transformative Journey for the Home Services Industry

IT leader: Amer Waheed, CTO

After using experience and intuition to make decisions for most of its first 40-plus years of existence, Neighborly is embracing a new data platform that enables data-driven decision-making.

The company started its New Analytics Era initiative by migrating its data from outdated SQL servers to a modern AWS data lake. It then built a cutting-edge cloud-based analytics platform, designed with an innovative data architecture. It also crafted multiple machine learning and AI models to tackle business challenges. And it created a new dashboard portal in QuickSight to provide a comprehensive view to track the results of each implemented action. This democratized data and disseminated crucial business insights across the entire organization.

“We created a platform to ingest, process, and get value from the data, so we could understand what the data is telling us,” explains Neighborly CTO Amer Waheed.

Waheed says creating a data science team, led by Karen Nogueira, VP of data and analytics, was instrumental to success. So was articulating the business value the data platform could deliver.

Fully deployed after several years of work, the platform allows Neighborly, a home services company, to detail and understand a customer’s journey and expectations and, thus, enable the company to tailor services to better meet customer needs. Those benefits improve customer satisfaction, support franchise owners, and help Neighborly grow its business.

“The project is really about a whole new way of doing business,” Waheed says.

Nogueira says the new data platform gives Neighborly a competitive advantage, helping the company “increase efficiency, reduce costs, generate more revenue, and ultimately get results faster.”

Novva’s water-free cooling system improves data center sustainability, performance

Organization: Novva Data Centers

Project: Colorado Springs Data Center’s Innovative Water-Free Cooling System Saves Millions of Gallons of Water Annually

IT leader: Steve Boyce, Vice President of Mission Critical

Novva Data Centers struck success for sustainability at its Colorado Springs facility by implementing a proprietary water-free cooling system.

The company used elevated floors, surrounding air, and heat exchange coils to create a system that cools the facility’s servers without wasting water. The system recycles heated air through heat exchange coils or uses refrigerant in a closed loop to convert it back to cold air. It also takes advantage of cooler nighttime temperatures, utilizing ambient air cooling for 75% to 80% of the year; it uses a hybrid system that combines ambient air with the water-free cooling technology to optimize efficiency for the remaining 20% to 25% of the year.

Novva calculates that its system saves between 150 and 200 million gallons of water annually that would otherwise have been needed to cool its facility. The accomplishment is particularly significant given concerns about the rapid depletion of water in Colorado River and proposed cuts in water usage in that region.

“Water is a huge resource, and we want to do what we can to conserve it,” says Jared Coleman, automation and controls manager for Novva. He notes that the system not only saves resources but also has improved data center performance. “This project really exemplifies how we do business. You don’t have to exploit the environment for business, and business doesn’t have to suffer because of environmental conscience.”

Novva’s approach goes against conventional designs among data centers, which have — and usually still do — use water as part of their primary cooling method, a practice that often stresses local resources and has raised concerns among stakeholders who want to or are required to track their environmental footprints.

Novva had first deployed its water-free cooling system at its Utah campus. Coleman says it plans to implement this system at all of its data centers.

OHLA taps AI for insurance compliance to reduce risks, yield savings

Organization: OHLA USA

Project: Leveraging AI & Automation to Achieve Subcontractor Insurance Compliance

IT leader: Srivatsan Raghavan, CIO

OHLA USA, a $1.2B company specializing in infrastructure projects, manages dozens of projects with hundreds of subcontractors performing about a third of the work. The company handles 700-plus claims annually, and it relies on insurance to mitigate financial risks.

Despite the criticality of insurance in the industry, OHLA found its longstanding insurance tracking system and the manual input work it required created both efficiency and risk concerns. Executives estimated those issues could result in millions of dollars in noncompliance costs.

So OHLA set out to replace the custom-built software it used to manage its insurance tracking with a modernized process. It sought to re-engineer the workflow and integrate process automation with artificial intelligence to transform how it handles insurance compliance.

The new system, deployed in 2023, eliminates the need for project managers to manually enter insurance certificate details. Process automation extracts email attachments, and a custom AI model extracts and saves policy details in a database.

Additionally, it offers a UI that the risk department can use for storing policy requirements and baseline limits as well as for comparing policies against those baselines. This capability allows the department to promptly identify deviations and quickly alert stakeholders.

CIO Srivatsan Raghavan says his team leaned on its experience and learnings from prior AI-enabled projects to envision the significant improvements that AI could bring to the insurance compliance function.

“We are looking for good ROI use cases for AI, and we saw this as a worthy use case to chase,” he adds.

Indeed, the company has reaped big returns. The new system reduces administrative workload and minimizes the risk of errors and noncompliance, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and risk management. OHLA estimates the new system will reduce the subcontractor noncompliance rate from 10% to 2%, yielding a potential yearly savings of $4.4 million.

New Putnam platform accelerates application development

Organization: Putnam Investments, now Franklin Templeton

Project: Putnam Investments Cloud-First DevOps Test Data Management Platform to Deliver World-Class Digital Customer Experiences

IT leader: Sumedh Mehta, CIO at time of project

Digital leadership at Putnam Investments (which was acquired by Franklin Templeton in January 2024) recognized the need for development teams to deliver software at a speed that matched the changing needs of its customers.

So it tasked the engineering team with developing a new technology architecture, with tools and processes to enable innovation and change at speed. The company sought to use higher levels of automation to develop and release software in a continuous improvement and continuous delivery (CI/CD) cycle.

The result: a cloud DevOps test data management platform that enables teams to rapidly stand up new data environments.

“We were after a quick and cost-effective way to provide quality testing data to investment users and technology associates,” says Joseph Gaffney, who sponsored and directed this project at Putnam Investments and is now VP of IT at Franklin Templeton.

“This project was transformative because we were able to give our business users and agile technology teams access to quality data in a matter of minutes versus days,” he adds. “The biggest benefit is the agility it provides our business users and technology teams to continually improve and move fast. There is no more waiting around for quality data. So, from a software development perspective, the ROI is huge. Developers get access to production quality data whenever they need it. This greatly increases our time to market. From a cloud cost perspective, the Delphix data virtualization has helped us realize significant cost savings in way of storage. We no longer need physical databases with storage attached in our test environment.”

Gaffney says Franklin Templeton now uses the platform to help with its integration projects.

Regeneron turns to data to accelerate drug discovery and development