About this episode

Andrea Bergamini discusses the evolving role of the CIO in technology-driven businesses and shares insights on leadership, resilience, and AI adoption.

“Technology shouldn’t support the business. It should be the business.” As technology becomes inseparable from how companies operate, the role of the CIO is being fundamentally redefined. Today’s leaders are navigating growing complexity, diverse business models, rapid AI adoption, rising cyber risk, and globally distributed teams, while still being expected to deliver speed, resilience, and measurable outcomes. In this episode, Andrea Bergamini, CIO, Orbia, joins Karthik Padmanabhan, Managing Partner, Zinnov, for a candid conversation on what it truly takes to lead technology in a purpose-driven, multi-business global enterprise. Andrea shares his unconventional journey across GE, Heineken, Cargill, and Orbia, and how building cybersecurity from scratch as a Greenfield CISO shaped his philosophy of owning mission-critical capabilities. He explains how Orbia structures technology around a strong core foundation while embedding IT deeply into each business, moving beyond “alignment” toward operating technology as the business itself. The conversation also explores Orbia’s pragmatic approach to AI, balancing productivity enablement, citizen development, and advanced use cases—along…

People in this episode

Host: Karthik Padmanabhan

Guest: Andrea Bergamini

Topics covered

• CIO mindset
• technology leadership
• AI adoption
• cybersecurity
• business resilience
• global enterprises

Keywords

• CIO
• technology
• business models
• cyber risk
• AI
• leadership
• innovation
• resilience

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Orbia, GE, Heineken, Cargill

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