The Hartford CIO Deepa Soni on transforming at scale

Deepa Soni’s CIO story is one of sacrifice, breaking through comfort zones, and building confidence in redefining the art of the possible. In a career spanning such companies as IBM, KeyCorp, M&T Bank, and BMO, she has “answered the call” many times, most recently as CIO of The Hartford, where she is responsible for the overall strategy, vision, and execution of business technology, cyber, data analytics, and data science.

On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Soni and I unpacked her leadership philosophies and business-centric approach to technology. She also shared some of the lessons she’s learned about taking risks, navigating complexity, fostering an innovative culture, and creating significant impact across the business.

Afterwards we spent some more time focused specifically on Soni’s perspectives around the power of what she calls “the 4 EAs @scale, @pace”: enterprise agility, enterprise AI, extreme automation, and employee (skill) advancement. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Roberts: The imperative to drive growth, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance customer experiences has become even more heightened of late. What role does the power of enterprise agility play in your efforts to achieve these imperatives?

Deepa Soni: We strongly believe that enterprise agility and speed-to-market are key competitive advantages, and they’re a key tenant of our objectives. We are focused on being agile, not ‘doing Agile.’ The second aspect of our agility is that we strongly believe in enterprise agility — the business, the technology, finance, HR, all functions came together to really change our ways of working to deliver technology. That has been a key foundation of how we work, and it’s given us the foundation to actually take the next step change, the next EA, which is the power of enterprise AI.

As part of your enterprise AI pillar, you use the phrase ‘information advantage’ to signify a strategy of leveraging data, advanced analytics, and machine learning to unlock value for your business and customers. Can you expand on that?