Chapter Eight

The CEO/CIO Agenda: Five Moves for the Next 12 Months

The CEO/CIO Agenda: Five Moves for the Next 12 Months

01 Run an AI-Readiness Review of the Cloud Estate:

Identify workloads where AI changes the economics, risk profile, or placement logic

02 Define the Minimum Viable Company

Agree which data, platforms, decision workflows and AI capabilities are crown jewels requiring maximum control

03 Create a Structured AI Experimentation Model

Replace unmanaged shadow AI with safe sandboxes, fast pilot pathways and production-grade controls

04 Stand Up Fin-Ops for AI

Track costs by product, workflow and agent, Link consumption to business value; and negotiate transparency into SaaS AI pricing

05 Design the Agent Accountability Model

Give every production agent an owner, identity, scope, budget, evaluation regime and kill switch

_{Within ING Bank, Stage 1 (AI-Readiness review) has been assessed for both improved business processes and appetite for risk and governance adherence.}

_{Stages 2 and 3 focused on the AI development/governance architecture, broken down into 3 pillars, where the first pillar is an experimentation/labs environment, alongside 2 additional pillars of Sector/Product and globally developed AI solutions.}

_{A level of governance is being built across this model to ensure minimization of token usage and cost (part of Stage 4), by identifying/suggesting reuse of prompts, agents, sub-agents and skills. Stage 5 is key to ensuring we strive to keep the bank safe for our customers.}

Steve Crombie, CIO Bulgaria, ING Bank

The Leadership Choice

The next wave of advantages will not come from being cloud-first. It will come from being AI-ready: able to deploy autonomous capability quickly, economically and responsibly without losing control of the enterprise.

For senior executives, the message is simple: AI is forcing a second look at cloud strategy, but the answer is not nostalgia for on premises nor blind faith in hyperscale.

The answer is disciplined optionality – a technology estate that can place workloads intelligently, protect crown jewels, manage consumption, govern agents, and redeploy human talent toward the work only humans should do.