- CIOsurge
- Posts
- ☁️ Cloud spend keeps climbing — and CIOs are still all in
☁️ Cloud spend keeps climbing — and CIOs are still all in
Cloud Overspend Persists, Data Quality Threatens AI, New CIOs at Bridgestone and Sprinklr
Zack Tembi
April 22, 2025
Powered by Single Fin
Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!
This week:
CIOs remain committed to cloud adoption despite 25%+ overspend, focusing on better FinOps and developer awareness.
Misalignment on data quality between execs and directors is putting AI initiatives at risk, with foundational issues often ignored.
Bridgestone and Sprinklr appoint new CIOs to lead enterprise-wide digital and security strategies.
Let’s make this week a game-changer.
Stay sharp. Stay ahead.
☁️ Cloud spend keeps climbing — and CIOs are still all in
Despite 83% of CIOs reporting cloud costs have exceeded expectations—often by more than 25%—most still view the cloud as more cost-effective than on-prem solutions. AI workloads and uninformed developer decisions are driving the surge, yet 80% of leaders say the cloud still enables faster innovation and business value, making the overspend an accepted tradeoff.
We’re in a strange moment where cloud cost overruns aren’t leading to cloud pullbacks—they’re leading to smarter containment strategies. This Azul report reflects what a lot of us are seeing on the ground: AI, scale, and speed come at a price, but the cost of not adopting them is even higher. CIOs aren’t pulling back—they’re just working harder to get better visibility and governance.
One major blind spot is developer education. If our engineers don’t know what services cost, they’ll keep unknowingly racking up charges. We need to build financial awareness into the DevOps process—not as a restriction, but as a shared responsibility. Pair that with sharper FinOps practices and more granular observability, and we can keep innovating without breaking the budget.
- Zack Tembi
📊 Data quality disconnect threatens AI success for CIOs
While 50% of C-level execs believe their data is AI-ready, only 37% of director-level leaders agree, according to Softserve research. This confidence gap, driven by polished dashboards masking backend issues, is already leading to poor decision-making and flawed AI projects—many launched without proper data foundations or quality oversight.
This should hit close to home: our dashboards look great, but behind the scenes, broken pipelines and misaligned data definitions tell a different story. The deeper you go into the stack, the more cracks you find. And if we build AI on top of that, we’re not innovating—we’re gambling.
If we want AI to work, we need to get brutally honest about our data quality. That means empowering directors and VPs to challenge assumptions, investing in QA-style skeptics for data projects, and building roadmaps that prioritize foundational fixes over flashy launches. A sleek dashboard doesn’t mean readiness—alignment across the org does.
- Zack Tembi
💬 Zack's Take
🛡️ Securing Agentic AI: The Governance Gap
One major concern emerging with the rise of agentic AI is the lack of clear governance. Companies are rapidly spinning up multiple AI agents without sufficiently tracking how these agents access, manipulate, and share critical data. Right now, a handful of agents may seem manageable, but soon organizations could have dozens interacting in ways no one fully anticipated.
What keeps me awake is the idea of "phantom results"—where agents start deviating from their intended prompts, potentially distorting data or exposing sensitive information. Without robust monitoring and governance, these small misalignments could spiral into significant security and compliance nightmares.
CIOs need to proactively build strong governance frameworks around AI now, not later. Start by defining clear guardrails, consistent monitoring, and automated checks to catch deviations early. Doing this groundwork upfront will save countless headaches as your AI capabilities inevitably scale.
🗞️ At A Glance
💡 CIO Spotlights
Eric Hodgins joins Precision Medicine Group as CIO/CTO to lead tech strategy
Precision Medicine Group has appointed pharma tech veteran Eric Hodgins as Chief Information and Technology Officer to oversee IT across R&D and commercial services.
Hodgins brings 30+ years of experience, including leadership at IQVIA and founding a clinical tech startup.
He aims to align agile, patient-focused technologies with biopharma business needs for faster, smarter outcomes.
Sprinklr hires Sanjay Macwan to bolster tech and security leadership
Sanjay Macwan has been named CIO of Sprinklr, tasked with overseeing global IT, enterprise security, and data infrastructure strategy.
With prior CIO and CISO roles at Vonage and NBCUniversal, Macwan brings deep experience in scaling secure, cloud-native platforms.
CEO Rory Read sees Macwan as key to accelerating Sprinklr’s AI-native growth with speed, trust, and operational resilience.