A new playbook for driving AI ROI is emerging, with top CIOs recommending a pattern-centric approach, standardized data, and better business alignment to drive gains in customer experience, productivity, and cost savings.

Why it matters: As AI adoption accelerates, businesses are focused on demonstrating tangible returns on their investments. CIOs are bullish on the technology, with 66% reporting confidence that AI will drive ROI, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Driving the news: CIOs from PwC, Medtronic, and Saks are focusing on three key strategies:

• Pattern-Based Optimization: By identifying common patterns and processes across the organization, businesses can leverage AI to optimize these areas at scale, leading to greater efficiency and a higher return on investment.
  • “In the case of AI, what we’re saying at PwC is if you allow it to be a niche-based strategy rather than a pattern-based strategy, you’re gonna end up potentially suboptimizing that investment,” said James Shira, CIO at PwC.

In the case of AI, what we’re saying at PwC is if you allow it to be a niche-based strategy rather than a pattern-based strategy, you’re gonna end up potentially suboptimizing that investment.

James Shira, CIO, PwC

• Data Standardization: Data standardization is crucial for successful AI implementation. CIOs highlight the need for clean, consistent, and accessible data to enable AI algorithms to extract meaningful insights and drive accurate decision-making.
  • “If you think about the value of AI, we have 40 years’ worth of clinical trial data for different devices. Right now it’s sitting somewhere in a storage archive. If we can take that out, create some intelligence out of it, the way it will shape future therapies will be just amazing,” said Rashmi Kumar, SVP & Global CIO at Medtronic.  
• Business Outcome Alignment: When discussing AI with different groups, CIOs focus on aligning their approach with the business’s goals and how AI can help achieve those goals, avoiding technical jargon.
  • “Sometimes the best thing a technologist can do is not‌ talk about the technology. We want to talk about the outcomes. And so we really need to understand the business,” said Mat Mathews, Former CIO at Boys and Girls Club of America.

Real-world impact: Early results are promising: Companies are reporting significant gains in productivity and cost savings from strategic AI implementation. These successes underscore the potential of AI to drive transformative change when implemented strategically. 

Our take: The industry is moving toward platforms that integrate AI with data, trust, and automation to optimize ROI. Salesforce is helping customers achieve success with its unified platform, which integrates agentic AI into cohesive solutions that are context-aware and scalable. 

• Data Cloud, a hyperscale data platform built directly into Salesforce, provides seamless integration and access to critical company data and metadata while the Einstein Trust Layer ensures security and compliance, eliminating bias and building confidence in AI-generated outputs. 
• Agentforce further enhances this by enabling AI agents to act autonomously, ensuring they operate within enterprise-grade security, governance, and data frameworks. 
• At the heart of this unified platform, two additional components bring the models to life — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and reasoning — extending the capabilities of traditional LLMs to create a more robust AI strategy.

Go deeper:

• Watch the full CIO Corner episodes featuring executives from PWC, Medtronic, and more
• Read how CIOs are helping employees adopt agentic AI at work
• Find out how digital labor will reshape the enterprise

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