Why CIOs are critical for 100X business growth: FUSION’25 Keynote Highlights

At Atomicwork’s first ever conference, FUSION'25, 100+ CIOs and technology leaders came together to discuss one thing: how to best make use of the 100x opportunity available to them, through AI.

The promise of AI is extraordinary. But like any new technology, the challenge lies not in the demo environment but in the operational reality. It’s easy to be wowed by prototypes; it’s harder to make them work reliably at enterprise scale. That’s why the role of IT and business technology leaders is pivotal: we must not only reduce risk, but also introduce the right kinds of risk that help our organizations leapfrog into the future.

The pace of change

In just the last three years, we’ve seen AI evolve from consumerized foundation models (late 2022 with ChatGPT) to improved reasoning, to multimodality (voice, vision, chat), and now into the era of AI Agents. Every week brings something new. Reinforcement learning and model training techniques are driving exponential improvements in capability, giving us 1–10x leaps with each new generation.

For enterprises, this isn’t just about tools getting smarter; it’s about how work itself changes. We’re moving from AI assistants to AI agents and, soon, to AI coworkers that fundamentally reshape how we operate.

Four core experiences to transform businesses

To make AI adoption meaningful, leaders should anchor their strategy around four core experiences that drive any innovative organization.

1. Customer experience
   The ultimate purpose of every business is to serve customers. AI can transform onboarding, support, and enablement with real-time, multimodal interactions. If you haven’t yet experimented here, start small; the innovations are real and measurable. ‍
2. Employee experience
   Your business moves at the speed of your back office. Enterprise services and support often lag behind customer-facing functions, but AI can close that gap. Empowering employees with faster, smarter enterprise services ensures the business keeps pace with customer expectations. ‍
3. Developer experience
   Generative AI won’t replace engineers, but it can make good engineers great. From triaging and troubleshooting to building and deploying faster, AI enables teams to ship with more confidence and velocity. ‍
4. Operational experience
   Processes are the backbone of enterprise work and often the most painful. AI agents can already take on tasks like vendor onboarding or purchase order management. While still maturing, these use cases show how operations can be radically accelerated.

IT, the force multiplier

Here's what we've learned after working with many enterprise leaders:

You can’t just buy AI, layer it atop broken processes, and expect 100x returns.  

Three foundational capabilities need to work together for organizations to be successful.

1. Universal context
   AI doesn’t actually have a data problem — it has a metadata problem. It needs to understand the “what” and “who” in your business. Who’s the end user? What’s the system of record? What permissions apply? CIOs must ensure enterprise metadata spread across platforms like Salesforce, SharePoint, Slack, Okta, and more is unified so that AI can make decisions and operate with clarity. ‍
2. Dynamic automation
   True transformation requires dynamic, multi-step automation that adapts in real time. Automating vendor onboarding that spans finance, legal, and procurement teams or supply chain adjustments that respond to market changes are ideal use cases. CIOs need to build adaptive, cross-functional flows where AI and humans collaborate fluidly.
3. ‍Universal agent
   Just as we once experienced app sprawl, we’re now entering a world of agent sprawl. Employees don’t want a dozen different bots but one trusted interface that can. This is the universal agent: a single experience where employees can request and resolve their requests, whether it’s filing expenses or troubleshooting their device.  

When businesses bring context, automation, and a universal agent together, AI becomes a company-wide force multiplier and leap from 10X to 100X.

A call to enterprise tech leaders

At FUSION'25, Vijay challenged the role of IT and its keepers: AI is no longer about keeping the lights on. It’s about lighting the way.

The old law was simple: technology scaled exponentially, organizations scaled logarithmically. The new law is more ambitious: with AI that’s led by visionary CIOs, both technology and growth scales exponentially.

So the question we set before every CIO is no longer if you’ll use AI.

The question is: will you use AI to get 10X gains — or to build a 100X company?

Stay tuned to catch the keynote and all other FUSION'25 sessions on-demand.