No more waiting: Enterprise AI transformation has become the top CEO mandate

Enterprise AI transformation is clearing the proof-of-concept stage for many organizations, with execution at scale becoming the new challenge that IT departments alone can’t handle.

Governance, talent and organizational structure are required to meet C-suite mandates, according to Daniel Prager (pictured, right), global partner development lead for Google Cloud at Slalom Consulting LLC, a global business and technology consulting firm. Working closely with customers navigating the gap between AI ambition and measurable business impact, Slalom sees these same friction points as the forces most likely to slow even the best-laid transformation plans.

“What we’re seeing right now is a lot of folks in the C-suite are very excited about AI. They’ve invested in AI. They’re constantly asking VPs and below, ‘What’s happening with AI in our enterprise? Why aren’t we moving faster? Why aren’t we realizing the vision that we’ve set out?'” Prager said. “Organizations can’t quite move as quickly as they want due to concerns around governance, security and then also talent.”

Prager and Sean Everhart (left), managing director of Google Cloud at Slalom, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik at Google Cloud Next, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Slalom is helping enterprises move from isolated pilots to full-scale AI transformation and why the C-suite has become the fastest-moving constituency in the process. (* Disclosure below.)

AI transformation accelerates as C-suite pressure and agentic platforms converge

The strategic shift happening right now is from AI as an assistant to AI as a platform of managed agents. Legacy modernization has emerged as one of the most surprising early wins, according to Everhart. AI tooling can now inspect fragile, decades-old COBOL codebases and decompose their complexity while generating executable modernization plans in a fraction of the time.

“Some things that might have taken three months in the past can take four hours today,” Everhart said. “When you collapse some of those key moments in a lifecycle, you need to change everything.”

That acceleration is showing up directly on the income statement. Slalom recently ran a pilot with a large manufacturer focused on warranty claims, feeding just 1% of their workflow through an AI agent pipeline, Prager explained. The result was nearly a million dollars in top-line savings from that single slice of volume alone. It’s the sort of concrete outcome that has moved AI transformation from a CIO initiative to CEO mandate, Everhart added.

“We’re going to a point where execution has become so fast, all of a sudden, the idea is much more valuable than it’s ever been, and that’s why the C-suite is so hot right now,” Everhart said. “That’s why you come back to your C-suite. You have this backlog of ideas and now we have execution engines that can make it real in a lapsed timeframe.”

The firm now shows up to client engagements with working demos and prototypes instead of slide decks. Slalom uses AI to surface relationship context across its 10,000 employees, reorganizing delivery around cross-functional teams — project managers, designers, and full-stack AI engineers — who continuously rebuild business processes on agentic platforms rather than shipping incremental updates. The most underappreciated story of this AI moment is the technically fluent services partner that can bridge developer-level depth to C-suite outcomes, according to Prager.

“As the build collapses and as it becomes easier to build things, the challenge is around defining the problem in the right way, showing what the potential business value of the problem is and then also making whatever tool that you’ve built … [is] enabling folks to use it and maximize that value,” Prager said. “That’s why it’s such a fun time to be a services partner right now.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next:

(* Disclosure: Slalom sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Slalom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE