Treating AI as Enablement, Not Outcome with Leidos SVP & CIO Alexandra Guenther

0:01Hi there, and welcome to Enterprise AI Innovators, a show where top technology executives share how AI is transforming the enterprise. In each episode, guests uncover the real-world applications of AI, from improving products and optimizing operations to redefining the customer experience. I'm Evan Reiser, the founder and CEO of Abnormal AI. And I'm Salmo Tamidi, a general partner at Greylock Partners. Today I'm talking with Alexandra Guenther, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Laiados. Leidos is a Fortune 500 company that serves defense, intelligence, homeland, and health customers around the world.

0:36Alexandra is deploying AI across all of it, and she's built a value framework to decide where it actually belongs. A few things stuck with me from this conversation. First, when Alexandra rolled out AI, she asked people one question, what's one task you never want to do again? The answer was the weekly activity reports, so they built GPTs to handle it, and once people saw what was possible, her backlog started growing. Second, when she got a new laptop last week, she hit an error message. Instead of calling the service desk, she used Lido's new chatbot capability, got the right instructions, and fixed it herself in three minutes.

1:06And finally, Alexandra explains why AI is an enablement, not the outcome. At a recent conference, nobody led with AI. The questions were all about business strategy, and she loved it because AI belongs in the how, not the what. Alexandra, thank you so much for joining us today. I've been looking forward to this episode personally. Maybe to kind of kick us off, Do you mind sharing with our audience a little about kind of your role, kind of what you do today and maybe how you got here in your career? Absolutely. Thank you so much, Evan, and the entire team. I'm so excited to talk about all things business enablement and AI today.

1:38So I'm the chief information officer for Leidos. We're a Fortune 500 company and we operate globally. So that means we get to understand how data, AI, and technology works all over the world and enable 50 ,000 employees to be their most productive, supercharged selves to provide IT services for our customer base. And so over my career, over 20, almost 25 years now, I have been providing IT and cyber services to clients all around the globe. and in the last two to three years, sitting in the CIO seat, really looking at how do we make technology enablement even more tangible for our employees? And it's always a special privilege to be able to figure out how to make the digital tangible.

2:25I think people quite fully appreciate the full scale of operations. So maybe you can share a little bit to kind of give some perspective there and maybe talk a little bit about kind of some of the responsibilities of following you as CIO? We have a very diverse set of operations at Leidos. So we have a defense sector, which is primarily serving our U.S. government. We have a intel sector, which is serving our intel communities, very high-end software, cyber capabilities, and complex solutions there. We've got our homeland team, which is serving homelands, both here in the United States as well as overseas.

3:03And so providing capabilities, IT and cyber to both governments, regulated industries, and international customers. We also have a health sector, which is providing health services all across the US, especially to our veteran community. And so we're working with doctors and nurses and mobile clinics. And so the diversity across across these different sectors and businesses is quite large. We also have a business sector where they homed all of our core digital transformation initiatives and capabilities. It's called our digital sector. And so that is where a lot of our technology capabilities will source from.

3:49And we within the CIO will often, we call it customer zero. So we pilot those capabilities and determine if we can provide back a proof point. And one of my favorite parts about my job is even as CIO is still being able to go talk to customers about what's working, about what's hard, about what else we tried, what else we considered. And so those kinds of real world conversations are so impactful CIO to CIO, whether you're the client or you're on the contractor side. And so that's been really impactful. But the diversity there means it's a different conversation. when we apply our four value framework.

4:26So if I'm talking to the CFO and our back office functions, we're talking about cost cutting and risk reduction and productivity. If I'm talking about the defense sector, we're talking about how can we meet this administration's goals for increasing capacity of production for autonomous capabilities, right? And so whether it's drones, it's missiles, it's weapon systems, how can we secure the supply chain? How can we increase capacity? How can we streamline contracts? And so that's going to be a different conversation than health, which is how can I mobilize technology to hit rural places in the country to meet medicine where there's a veteran?

5:03And so these business cases create a very different dynamic. The beauty of the AI lever framework is which value lever is most important to you or which two or three are most important to you. And then how can we enable that technologically? And that's a starting point for a great conversation. Are there any specific projects or examples of where you've applied some of the technology you feel you're pretty proud about, right? Or maybe use AI and it could be onboarding, offboarding or anything else that just stands out or like, hey, that was a pretty cool or slick application we deployed. We're currently in the middle of deploying our Service Desk of the Future framework.

5:41So one of the things I loved is we put a tagline around it. It's the Service Desk of the Future. This is where we get employees self-service at a level they haven't seen before and can and automate a lot of the tier one work in order to get to a tier two capable human faster and deploy tier one humans up to that tier two, tier three level faster. So I love the Service Desk of the Future concept. We created a series of over a dozen specific automations, capabilities and AI capabilities that we've integrated. We just rolled out our talk framework. and so we have a digital employee access bot we call her iris so we have a partnership with moveworks which was bought by service now and they have a great employee experience digital bot capability that we invested in several years ago and we've been just building out the skills and capabilities there it is now talk enabled and so i got a new computer last week true story and i was trying to get in touch with one of the tech guys because I was running into an error message that kept popping up.

6:49And all of a sudden I realized, wait, I am now capable of using our talk capability. And it gave me instructions. It gave me the right instructions, which is most important. And I was able to fix the issue myself and within three minutes. And that kind of empowerment is impactful to employees. And it is impactful to the organization that is proactively managing service desk at a level and pace that we haven't yet seen before. Yeah, I was kind of curious, like when you think about these new use cases that have come up, either because, you know, AI and technology unlocked more kind of bandwidth and more resources, or because there's kind of new use cases you can now solve with AI that weren't possible in the past.

7:31How do you figure out kind of like what to prioritize and like, you know, where do you start? So using that value framework is your first step. The other piece is you are inspiring humans, so you have to connect with what resonates with them. So something like building out the qualified pipeline is great for a corporation. Humans were only doing so much capacity, so you freed up some capacity there, but you didn't really touch their hearts. So one of the things that I did when we rolled out even the Gen AI capabilities is I said, what's one task for every team in the CIO? What's one task you never want to do again?

8:11And so one of them was we do a weekly activity report and everybody always complained about it. And so we created some generative AI capabilities, some GPTs that help cultivate, curate and then elevate our weekly activity reports. because it's like people were complaining about it. So making sure you're both using that value framework to make sure that you've got big ticket items, near-term items, long-term items, but also think and ask the teams, ask the humans. What do you not want to do? And there's like a couple of good questions there. One is what would you not want to do? What do you not have time to do currently that you would do?

8:53A great one is like look at your list of things and like what never gets done. And then how do you automate some of the stuff that's taking up your time so you can get to the big meatier things? Or do you want to apply automation or AI to that big meaty thing? So stuff like that was important for us. The finance team has been a phenomenal partner for us in using that exact rubric. There's a lot of really, really minutiae type tasks that the finance team has to do month in and month out in order to close the books, in order to compile invoices, in order to triple check everything against customer specifications.

9:31And so relieving them of that tedious tasking is a huge win for them. They are so grateful in order to be enabled and freed up from that. And it's been a great opportunity for us to demonstrate cross-functional partnership. Because as a CIO, that's one of the things that you've got to always be doing is saying, like, here, this is how I'm able to serve you, right? It's a servant kind of orientation. It's a servant leadership orientation. And so that horizontal enablement function is really important for us to be able to make sure we're delivering what they need at the time they need it and showing them what's possible.

10:12And then when you get the momentum of seeing what's possible, that's when they start saying, could you do this too? Can we get this? And like all of a sudden our backlog is growing because people are finally catching on into what's possible. I mean, operating around the world with tens of thousands of employees, multiple business units, that's kind of hard as it is. Now on top of that, right, we're in this like crazy era of AI where, you know, the world hasn't changed as fast in a long time, right? There's new ways of doing things and we're kind of learning new stuff every day. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on like how that changes both like your personal approach to leadership, how you think about building teams, how you develop the culture, how the nature of work is changing.

10:47You know, what do you see kind of changing the age of AI and how are you kind of like trying to accelerate in the right direction to take advantage of the upsides without kind of getting stuck in a world where just things are changing fast and it becomes overwhelming? Yes, this world of AI is, it's truly transformative for the globe. And it's an awesome, awesome place and time to be in technology. It's also an exhausting time to be in technology. And this is where when we talk about AI and the race of AI, I often use a race marathon kind of a metaphor, because you have the start of the race, where you've got a lot of hopes, dreams and some nerves, and trying to figure out like, what's my plan of attack?

11:29What do I want to do? This is people who are starting Gen AI pilots, who are trying to figure out what is their use cases, what is their value lever framework they're going to use to evaluate use cases. And then you have the middle of the race, where if you've ever run distance, it's a slog. It is hard. This is where your grit is tested. This is where if you're applying the metaphor to the corporation in AI, this is where you're doing data lineage and data quality and trying to earn the hearts and minds of data stewards so they keep up your enterprise data warehouse so that you can create agentic infrastructure and agentic operations at scale.

12:06And then you have like the front of the pack that's getting towards the finish line. You feel like you can do it. You feel empowered. You understand where you've been. You have a frame of reference to get over that finish line. And you're able to really see and start to reap the benefits of where you've been. Now, the catch is you can't get all the benefits of finishing the race without having run it, but you can get those mile marker wins along the way. And so while you can have quick wins, if you're really looking as a Fortune 500 company to deliver agentic operations at scale and transform your business processes from the inside out and transform your back office functions across the board and create net new capabilities for net new markets for your businesses, you're going to have to run the whole race.

12:56And the good news is there's a bunch of us that have run it. And like any good marathon, you have people all along the way cheering you on, giving you water and providing insights into you're just around the curve. This is the mile marker you're at. This is what you can expect next. And so there's a tremendous rallying cry across technology leaders where we are pulling for each other and sharing our insights in a way that is, I'll say, more collaborative than what I've seen even in the last 10 years. You know, this is actually more of a bit of a personal question, but I think one of the challenges that I struggle with is like the technology is changing so fast.

13:34The best way to do something is changing so fast. It can feel a little bit overwhelming to like the average employee, right? Right. And like, there's some framework overload. We all have like AI overload as well. Right. And like the best practice today might be different tomorrow. How do you like kind of manage that? Or like any pro tips for aspiring, you know, professional, you know, that comes out there about what to do? Change. People change, technology change, organizational change, you know, personal changes in your life. It all triggers the same biological response, a fight, flight, hide response.

14:07The other key thing to know about this response is when you're in it, your frontal cortex goes offline. So you're not thinking strategically. You're not thinking creatively. You are not like you're not leaning in. And so when AI hit and we started talking about organizational change management is like the new buzzword everyone's talking about. I mean, as a systems engineer, you know, this concept is not new to me, but it's getting a lot more airtime. And I saw it as a really interesting signal from industry as change fatigue is talked about, organizational change management is needed and talked about that we're hitting the biological response of change.

14:46And so my tactics I tell everyone is know it so you can give grace to yourself and your teams, but don't let them stay there. So your job as a leader is to give them a vision that you are passionate about because your passion will help pull them out of that fight, flight, hide response and give them something to then go towards. And if you give someone a path out of where they are, they usually take it. And so that's all you need. You just need to meet them where they are, but make sure you don't stay there and then be able to move out with them with a clear vision, a convicting set of principles and capabilities that you're working towards and really empower and enable them to get there.

15:30And that is what I have found has been able to allow my teams to get through that slog of that mid-marathon. You know, just, whew, that's hard. You're doing hard work and you have to acknowledge it, which is also why it's important to celebrate. So combining human change management with technology immersion, with the capabilities and the challenges of the business is really beautiful trifecta that's happening. And we have the privilege of leading through it. And when you look at it that way and feel like you have the tactics to lead through it, it's a more motivating perspective, I found. So that was on the leadership side.

16:11What about maybe on like the coaching or the mentoring side, right? I think one challenge a lot of organizations face is, you know, they have to kind of reimagine how to do things, right? The business process, even the org chart, right? And just like, and like whatever the best practice was last month in this new AIR, there's new considerations, right? Maybe you don't have to backfill that role. Maybe we don't have to do the same thing. It was a new way to solve the problem we've been trying to solve for a long time. How do you kind of like, you know, set the right culture? How do you kind of guide your kind of managers to help enable them to really kind of reimagine what's possible in this new AI era.

16:42Take the time when you have an attrition on your team to sit and say, what do I actually need to build to be ready for tomorrow? Because how we built it previously, it met yesterday's context and goals and challenges and technologies, which is great. Like you met the moment in that moment, but we're in a different moment now. And so you want to give yourself an opportunity to really say, what can I do differently? So the other piece to remember is technology doesn't transform organizations. People use technology to transform their operations. And so as we look at how do we want to change the way we operate and operate in a more innovative, creative way, it opens the aperture, but you have to lean into that.

17:29And you have to plot out like, we're going to try this. And you can share it with your teams. I've actually shared with my teams in the past. I have an operating model that I think will work, but I'm counting on you to give me feedback loops. And if it needs to be tweaked, it will. So when I stood up two years ago, when I came into the role, I reorganized the chief information office. And one of the things I did is I stood up a CDAO in order to operationalize AI, to implement our data strategy, and to really centralize our teams that were doing the under the covers work of our EDW management and our pilots and a host of different like value creating automation innovative type strategies and capabilities and so I centralized them all together and we had a question we had one technology service now and if you know service now they play in a lot of different fronts and so I had another organization that had all of my IT operations and I had a third organization I stood up that was our business transformation.

18:32So that's the how we transform, how we audit, how we govern, how we manage financially, all of that. And so I said, where do I put the ServiceNow capability? It could go in the how we financially manage, audit, and report on everything. It could go in our typical IT services, because it's how we do service tasks and a whole host of other capabilities. Or it could go in this new CDAO, because it's how we deliver innovation and automation, and even has AI capabilities native. And so I said, all right, guys, I'm actually going to leave it in the IT operations org, but I want to revisit this in six to 12 months.

19:08And we did. And we ended up putting it this year in the CDAO. And we're delivering differently, thinking about how to leverage that technology through the lens of innovation automation and AI. I'd love to have you share something about like some way you guys are using AI. That'd be surprising. I just think like there's technology you guys are deploying and there's magical things you're doing. But I think the average listener probably doesn't fully appreciate. When we think about how can your organization deploy AI in semi-creative ways, but like really just impactful ways. One of the things that I've really enjoyed watching is as we create like digital twins of different people and we create different opportunities to harness knowledge and experience in a net new way so other people can capitalize on it.

20:03And one of the ways we did that is we have a series of digital practices. And so I mentioned one of our business units is the digital sector. And they have practices in different core areas of cloud and network defense and AI and data advantage. And they created basically like a digital brain. And it has infused in it several of the practice leaders, like core data sets and knowledge bases and uploading different information we have also from the corporation. And one of our CEO's taglines is, if we only knew what we all know. And this is where a tagline, a concept of like, wouldn't that be great?

20:50No, it's now possible. And so something like that, where we look at how do you take 50 ,000 people's ideas, concepts and past experiences and mine it as a way that someone in a random state in a random city working for a tough client can actually bring that information to bear in a really meaningful value oriented way. And this idea of creating like a digital brain and a concept that people can query and just interact with, right? Like you would a chatbot. But to be able to have access to more people's experiences, that's how we know what we all know. Yeah. By the way, I think that's a wonderful example.

21:33I mean, it's actually one of the few intersections, if you've done that I've done. I've created this thing called Evan AI. And basically it's like, if I just feed in all the emails, the LinkedIn posts, the Twitter feeds, the customer conversations, every transcript, I record, I think, like 18 months worth of everything I've said, everyone I've talked to, right? 90%. And like you feed it into, you know, this giant database, you run these models on top of it. It's, it's amazing. I'm like, I said that, like a customer told me that you forget what you already know. Right. And like, if you use heartless and power, like forget 10 ,000 IQ, if we get like, if I get a hundred IQ out of my own brain, like, you know, it could be pretty powerful.

22:09So anyway, I really like that example. And I think half the people will view that as science fiction. The other half will be like, that's exactly right. And I think that percentage is shifting very quickly. So I know we got limited time. We like to the end of the episode to do a lightning round. Basically ask you questions that are very hard to answer in a short period of time, but kind of looking for like the one tweet response. And these are going to be too controversial. Okay. So how should companies measure the success of the CIO in kind of this AI era? I think you want to be measuring the value orientation in short and long-term phases.

22:46And so get out your mile markers and start talking about value to the business. It's no longer about ROI and it's no longer about I'm going to deploy this technology in 24 months. It's how are we increasing revenue? How are we driving down costs? What are we doing about our risk profile? And how are we producing more capable employees sooner? And if you can speak to each one of those in a real tactical board oriented way, then I think you're a pretty darn successful CIO. If you were kind of giving advice to maybe a peer just stepping into a new CIO role and they said, Alexandra, what's like the first three things I should do to like, you know, I must do my first year to be successful.

23:26What would those three things be? Recognize you cannot build resilience into an exhausted organization. Take the temperature of your organization and your leaders. understand where they are so you can chart their path forward. Second, understand the value levers of your corporation. What are your businesses, your CEO, and your back office functions value most and build to that. And third is don't forget to celebrate because this is a hard job and it can be lonely in the C-suite. And so find yourself a tribe and celebrate with them. Okay. So maybe switching gears to the personal side, is there a book you've read that's had a, you know, it doesn't have to be a recent, it doesn't have to be a technology book, but any book you've read that's had an impact on, you know, your leadership or your kind of working style?

24:13Good to Great. So Good to Great is a story that follows a handful of companies that didn't just have great outcomes while a CEO was in play, but actually sustained them for 10 to 15 years after that CEO instituted sustainable changes that basically succeeded them. And I always consider that to be the measure of a great leader because it's not about anyone can outwork like a singular problem in a point in time. I shouldn't say anyone. You can outwork most problems in a point in time. But to sustain it means you set your teams up for success, means you saw future problems and built-in measures for those.

24:59And that is a sign of a great leader. Any advice for other CIOs out there about how do you stay up to date with AI when there's like new stuff happening every day, every week? There's a couple of things. One is that tribe I mentioned that you want to be celebrating with. You want to be learning from them. I had a great mentor who said, you become wise beyond your years by assimilating other people's experiences into your own knowledge bank. And so I would advise people to be curious, be learning, have a growth mindset. And also, don't be afraid to stay current and stay deep based on what you're interested in, what you're excited about.

25:36I mean, as a systems engineer, how the systems fit together, how they work, how they're delivering value, I have a lot of passion for the types of capabilities and the solutions that we're putting out into the world. And so I do want them to be optimal. I do want them to outperform our competitors. And so once you have that edge, you show up different to work. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of there's this, I think, a parental saying where it's like, with your kids, let them read what they love so they love to read. And there's some similar version that's like, find things you're passionate about and go a little bit deeper there.

26:09That's like, you can kind of use that passion energy to kind of stay a little closer to things that you might otherwise let go of. Okay, I got two more questions. This next one is my personal favorite question to ask. What do you think will be true about AI's future impact in the world that most of your peers would disagree with? I believe and work in a way that AI is an enablement and it is not the outcome in and of itself. And not everyone has fully grasped that. I was at a conference recently and somebody, it was all about AI and it was for CIOs, CISOs and CFOs. But the entire time, all the questions weren't, how are you deploying AI?

26:51was how are you enabling the business strategy? And our answers included how AI weaves into that, but I loved it. I told the facilitator, you did a phenomenal job because you didn't lead with AI. It is a natural incorporation into the how, but it is not the what. Is there an upcoming technology that you're like personally just excited about? You're like, I think it's gonna be a big deal and you're just kind of following closely? I am particularly stoked about some of the autonomous capabilities that are coming out. So I started my career in the utility space. And I several years later, I got to go back to one of the major utilities in the US.

27:32And they were talking about how they were using robotic dogs. And they looked like dogs, they were robots, but they were in the shape of a dog. In order to go test out live wires to reduce the number of human casualties that happen all around the globe every year based on electrical injuries and catastrophes. And that really spoke to me. How can we leverage machines to keep humans safer? Not saying I'm going to jump in a plane that is not piloted, but I have driven in a driverless car. But this idea of like, how can autonomous capabilities create a safer, more capable world, there is something in there that's very futuristic.

28:15It's a little bit scary, but it can also be really beautiful. Yeah. This is like way off script. My first job, like 25 years ago, I worked at Kodak. It was a contract from the British military and it was about using these, at the time they're called multi-agent systems, and they're basically like these really dumb machine learning models where individually they couldn't do much, but you had like a thousand of them that would all communicate and kind of, you use a lot of the like insect based behaviors to kind of, and that is like, could you have a really small model where like by itself, it kind of doesn't do anything smart, but the swarm overall has like very intelligent capabilities.

28:53So like that's a personal interest of mine. Yeah. I will also say as a, as a followup to the coolest thing and autonomous drone and swarming technology is phenomenal. I had watched a couple of our research and development activities around just swarm engineering and how we are using basically what bees do naturally in order to infuse that same level of sensors, intelligence and instinct into autonomous drones in order to completely transform the way we're able to approach targets and understand and survey things. and just a phenomenal suite of technologies. And that's where you're like, the natural world still knows things that we haven't yet been able to define.

29:47And that's a pretty cool world to live in. Alexander, thank you so much for joining us. Really enjoyed the conversation and excited to chat again soon. Thank you, Evan. Looking forward to it. That was Alexandra Ganther, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Leidos. Thanks for listening to Enterprise AI Innovators. I'm Salmo Tamadi, a general partner at Greylock Partners. And I'm Evan Reiser, the founder and CEO of Abnormal AI. Please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Learn more about enterprise AI transformation at enterprisesoftware.blog. This show is produced by Abnormal Studios.

30:20See you next time.