Executives Accelerate AI-Driven Growth and Resilience

Details: Saturday, 08 November 2025 04:21

November 8, 2025 – Canadian CIOs are at a pivotal moment where the pressure to deliver business value through AI has never been greater.

From enhancing customer experiences to optimizing operations and unlocking new growth models, AI is rapidly becoming a strategic differentiator. Yet adoption comes with real challenges, including talent, governance, compliance, scalability, and balancing speed with risk.

With these principles in mind, The IT Media Group brought together 20 cross-industry IT executives for a roundtable entitled "Accelerating AI-Driven Growth and Resilience." The session uncovered how tech leaders navigate their challenges while leveraging AI to drive measurable enterprise success.

Jeff Ishii, Chief Technologist at The IT Media Group, moderated the roundtable. Also participating were executives from the session sponsor Amdocs, Global Go to Market Leader, Cloud Studio, Deborah Koens and Director, Financial Services, Roy Zamora.

The roundtable discussion focused on four key themes that influence how enterprises utilize AI to drive growth and resilience:

1. AI Adoption and Business Value

Achieving Enterprise AI
Embedding AI into Business Processes

2. Data Modernization for AI Readiness

AI-Ready Data Governance
Data Fabric and Integration Strategies

3. Cloud as an AI Accelerator

Optimizing Cloud for AI
AI-Centric Cloud Automation

4. Future-Ready Customer and Workforce Experiences

AI-Powered Customer Engagement
Intelligent Workforce Enablement

Roy Zamora spoke with enthusiasm about the transformative power of AI, reflecting both his engineering background and his consulting perspective on helping organizations navigate technological change. He emphasized that while agentic AI represents a powerful innovation, "it's not the silver bullet to everything," and organizations must instead focus on identifying the use cases that actually make sense to drive value. He noted that one of the biggest challenges today is quantifying AI's impact, explaining that organizations continue to invest in agentic AI without always having clear metrics.

Roy's call to action centred on helping organizations achieve efficiency and effectiveness through GenAI and automation, rather than simply reducing headcount or complexity. He emphasized that the real opportunity lies in addressing practical challenges while maintaining a sense of environmental and operational responsibility. "It's a great journey that we're all in," he concluded, recognizing both the excitement and balance required to realize AI's full potential. His remarks reinforced Amdocs's role as a trusted transformation partner, one that helps clients do "more with less" by combining innovation with disciplined value realization and sustainability.

Deborah Koens reflected on the roundtable as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how CIOs are navigating the tension between innovation and control in the age of AI. She noted that many organizations are "wrestling with the pace of change in the context of the guardrails versus rule-based thinking," capturing the universal challenge of determining how much freedom to give AI systems while maintaining governance and security. Deborah highlighted that participants offered diverse and valuable perspectives on striking this balance, emphasizing that "so many different perspectives on how to do that" emerged from the conversation.

Her key takeaway served as both an acknowledgment and a call to action: Amdocs must continue to listen closely to client challenges and translate these insights into practical, trusted solutions that help organizations accelerate AI safely. Deborah expressed gratitude for the openness of the dialogue, noting that it "really helps us as we're working with clients to understand the challenges that you all are having." Her remarks reinforce Amdocs's commitment to being not just a technology provider, but a collaborative partner helping CIOs navigate the shifting landscape of AI innovation, security, and governance with confidence and adaptability.

All roundtable participants will receive a report covering more than 120 challenges, strategies, and tactics that help their organizations to realize the power of AI.

For more on how The IT Media Group fosters collaboration amongst the CIO community, please visit our events page. Interested parties can subscribe to our Youtube channel to watch a host of CIO roundtable highlights and executive interviews covering leadership, technology, and operations topics that address compelling issues.

The IT Media Group is an award-winning producer of events and content for senior IT executives. Based in Toronto, our leadership team includes some of the most experienced and well-respected media, technology, and business professionals serving the IT executive community.