During the last five to seven years , the CIO role has become more of a customer-facing function . The days of being back-office focused , where IT was just a cost center , are gone . So , too , are the days of digital transformation – which suddenly feels too small and limiting for what lies ahead .

Generative AI ( genAI ) has been the difference . The past year ’ s innovations have exploded genAI ’ s capabilities , going beyond conventional Robotic Process Automation ( RPA ) and accelerating what ’ s possible , taking on the detailed and complex processes that have challenged the industry . mind the untold damage these incidents inflict on customer relationships .

To solve numbers like these , CIOs are already taking a hard look at how to leverage all the cutting-edge technology and tools showing up in the market .

In another survey conducted by PagerDuty , 71 % of respondents said their company is expanding investments in AI and machine learning in 2024 , and that number is only growing . Additionally , the business decision-makers in our survey ranked “ improving customer experience ” one of their top three strategic priorities .

CIOs now have a unique opportunity to both lead the genAI conversation and implement strategic initiatives to improve customer experience .

Analyzing PagerDuty platform data from nearly 20,000 accounts , one million users and tens of millions of incidents , we found that customer-facing incidents are increasing by 12.5 % year over year .

According to IDC , more than 53 % of organizations say an hour of downtime on a revenue-generating service costs a minimum of $ 100,000.00 .

Compare that with PagerDuty ’ s own survey of more than 500 IT leaders , which estimates the true cost of downtime to be $ 4,537 per minute . Assuming that the average resolution time takes 175 minutes – that means each customer-impacting digital incident can cost nearly $ 800,000 .

All told , the result is a mess of ballooning costs , revenue losses and wasted resources – never

Nevertheless , many organizations still struggle to identify and respond to service disruptions before they impact customers , reputation and revenue . Organizations may not realize where that puts them in relation to their competitors or how to fix it . Enter genAI to take customer service a giant leap forward .

GenAI can take a first pass at drafting communications , postmortems , automation runbooks and more

The influx of data – and increasing noise and frequency of incidents – is a firehose that humans simply can ’ t keep up with . Responding to every problem leaves room for error and the time spent resolving each one has a high cost . With automation as the first line of defense , machines can enrich and normalize data , run diagnostics , remediate issues and

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Intelligent CIO North America Issue 53 | Page 33