This year’s CIO 100 awards highlight a shift: chief information officers are delivering measurable business value — from BCG’s Deckster slide generator to Casey’s edge‑compute retail resilience — by pairing pragmatic product thinking with governance, adoption programmes and platforms that turn time and risk savings into new strategic options.
Boston Consulting Group’s internally built slide generator, an edge‑compute roll‑out at a convenience‑store chain and a host of other projects showcased in this year’s CIO 100 awards underline a plain truth: technology leaders are increasingly judged by the measurable business outcomes their teams deliver, not by the sophistication of the stacks they run.
At BCG the problem was mundane but time‑consuming — partners and consultants were spending hours formatting complex client decks rather than applying their domain expertise. According to a profile of the winners, the firm’s technology and business leaders decided that existing generative‑AI tools could not reliably automate slides that combine charts, tables and rich text, so they built their own system. The result, Deckster, stitches together the OpenAI API with a curated library of BCG templates and review workflows to produce fully formatted, client‑ready slides in seconds — a dramatic improvement from the firm’s previous 15‑minute norm for a slide. The CIO.com profile reports the platform now serves more than 10,000 monthly users and is available to all 32,000 BCG employees. Merim Becirovic, BCG’s CIO, managing director and partner, told CIO.com that the work has created a foundation to expand capabilities as people demand more functionality and tailored help.
BCG and outside observers stress that speed is not the only metric. The firm has folded governance, data security and client protection into Deckster’s design, and its public materials on AI collaboration with OpenAI emphasise production‑grade safeguards and responsible deployment. Business Insider’s reporting on consulting firms’ AI strategies places Deckster in the context of a broader internal push at major consultancies — where thousands of bespoke AI assistants and tools are being trialled — and highlights the balancing act between productivity gains and job‑design, governance and client confidentiality.
Efficiency and resilience were the chief objectives at Casey’s General Stores, which used an edge‑compute and store virtualisation project to harden operations across more than 2,600 locations. By virtualising store systems and running critical applications locally, Casey’s reduced latency, improved uptime and ensured stores could operate even when connectivity faltered. The company says the phased approach eased integration with legacy systems and the initiative finished ahead of schedule; Sanjeev Satturu, Casey’s CIO, told CIO.com that the lift not only cut costs and complexity but also sets the foundation for future AI use across the retail estate. Trade reporting identifies the vendor platform used in the rollout, noting the project’s centralised visibility and hardware consolidation benefits that should lower lifecycle costs and speed new‑store onboarding.
Other winners point to how focused IT projects translate into tangible business advantage across sectors. PepsiCo’s SalesLead+ unifies more than two dozen previously fragmented field apps into a single “single pane of glass” for sales managers, using a Location Insights framework to fuse geofencing, transaction and scheduling data into real‑time recommendations and alerts — an outcome the team says has improved leadership oversight and team performance. Ulta Beauty’s Project SOAR, recounted in the company’s investor materials and in the CIO 100 coverage, migrated core functions to a modern ERP to enable automation, ship‑from‑store and richer personalisation — a multiyear, company‑wide effort that executives describe as future‑proofing the retailer’s operating model.
Healthcare, humanitarian and industrial examples in the awards similarly emphasise duty‑of‑care, traceability and sustainability. Chemonics’ Global Safety and Security Portal consolidates personnel, asset and lessons‑learned data to help protect staff operating in volatile jurisdictions; the tool features GPS mapping and single‑view access to complex benefit and evacuation requirements, a capability the organisation says replaces a fragile mix of spreadsheets and point tools. Verizon’s Corporate Systems Group reworked supply‑chain collaboration using a blockchain‑based shared ledger to produce a single source of truth for unit‑level inventory and automated business rules — a programme its leaders argue has reduced capital ties and improved partner orchestration.
Sustainability as business value is embodied in Edifecs’ “Tech for Tomorrow” programme. The company consolidated data centres, adopted energy‑efficient infrastructure and partnered with certified recyclers to reduce e‑waste, while repurposing working devices for community digital centres in rural India. The firm frames these moves as both cost‑saving and values‑driven, linking reduced footprint with operational efficiencies and community benefit.
Two consistent themes run through the projects honoured this year. First, governance and adoption are as important as the technology itself: executive sponsorship, cross‑functional change programmes and training are repeatedly cited as crucial to getting projects adopted at scale. Second, CIOs are explicitly building platforms that convert time or risk reductions into strategic options — freeing staff for higher‑value work, improving customer experiences, or enabling new business models such as ship‑from‑store or real‑time supply‑chain coordination.
That shift — from IT as back‑office utility to IT as a business‑transforming asset — is the through‑line of the CIO 100 list. The case studies collectively argue that when technology leaders marry careful governance with pragmatic product thinking, the return is not just faster processes but new capabilities that change how organisations compete. As the BCG CIO put it to CIO.com, the next challenge is to “help everyone so they can be successful using it and to help each of them in their own way” — a reminder that scaling digital advantage is as much about people and processes as it is about code.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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