Episode Summary
In this Info-Tech LIVE New Orleans episode, Tom Zehren, CEO of Info-Tech Research Group, and John Burris, CIO of Southeastern Louisiana University, break down why AI efficiency is a growth mindset - not a cost-cutting exercise - and what the CIO role actually becomes when Agentic AI is the next IT super trend.
Featuring
Tom Zehren is CEO at Info-Tech Research Group - a global research and advisory firm now operating across North America, Europe, and APAC.
John Burris is CIO at Southeastern Louisiana University - and an associate professor of computer science focused on the theory of computation and Alan Turing’s work, who went from faculty to CIO in one of the sharpest career pivots in Higher Ed.
Timestamps
(1:00) AI efficiency reframed - why it's performance over cost, not a cut mindset
(5:00) How Info-Tech tools create a common language between CIOs and CEOs
(8:00) The era of autonomization - Tom Zehren on Agentic AI as the next IT super trend
(9:30) Agentic AI defined - autonomous decision-making vs. fancy automated workflows
(11:00) Student advising - the AI use case universities can't afford to miss
(15:00) What does the CIO role look like in 5–10 years?
(16:00) The exponential IT leader - Info-Tech's two-path prediction for where CIOs go from here
(23:00) Closing round - EQ, IQ & AQ: and what both guests want to explore next
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Transcript
Joe Toste: [00:00:00] Welcome to the TechTables podcast, live at Info-Tech Live in New Orleans. Super excited. We have a returning guest, Tom, CEO of Info-Tech and brand new guest, John. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves in a second.
Joe Toste: But really excited to have the both of you here on stage. And we're gonna share the great work today. Tom, why don't you kick us off just a little bit about yourself.
Tom Zehren: I'm Tom Zehren. I'm the CEO of Info-Tech Research Group. We provide research and advisory services. Across all industries and by now we are across three continents.
Tom Zehren: North America, Europe and APAC.
Joe Toste: You came on in Miami, which is really great. We had a fantastic episode.
Joe Toste: You're able to spend half a day with us at the City of Coral Gables. John, just give us a short intro about yourself.
John Burris: I'm John Burris. I'm the Chief Information Officer for Southeastern Louisiana University. It's a regional university with about 15,000.
John Burris: That's our enrollment. I am also an associate professor of computer science focusing more on the theory of computation and Allen Turing's work. And I've been CIO for about three [00:01:00] years and definitely been through the hard parts of being a CIO and learned a lot of lessons and I'm.
John Burris: I'm hoping that we can talk about those lessons today.
Joe Toste: I loved that online. It said that you, so you have a farm at your house?
Joe Toste: I do.
Joe Toste: Yeah. Tell us a little about that.
John Burris: We've scaled back a lot.
John Burris: This job does not give a lot of spare time for raising animals, but we raise primarily sheep for Muslim and Jewish communities in the area. It is incredibly hard to raise sheep in, in Louisiana. They have. Winter coats, and we don't have winter weather, so you have to keep up with them.
John Burris: But for those communities finding halal and kosher meat is a challenge. And so we've had a farm that was focused around that issue for about 45 years. I think that farm has been running. So with my father and then down through me.
Joe Toste: That's great. Oftentimes I'll talk about on the podcast, the human-centric side.
Joe Toste: And so we are all humans. We forget about that sometimes in the technology, but humans drive everything. John, we talked about off camera topic that you don't think is talked about enough, and I think this is actually really great AI efficiency. So I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start with you. Talk about that.
Joe Toste: What [00:02:00] did you mean by that?
John Burris: Sure. So when I have discussions in our organization about. Integrating AI into our business practices. There's always this concern that as we build our strategy, one of the four main areas that we focus on is building efficiency in the organization. And I've noticed that this creates a lot of fear or concern from the people that I work with.
John Burris: And we're a regional university in South Louisiana. About 50% of our budget is salaries, and I'm guessing about 40% is air conditioning. So there's not a lot to cut when you look at how we increase efficiency. But efficiency, the formula for efficiency is that it is equal to performance over cost.
John Burris: And I think as leaders, we know that what we're seeking is an increase in performance that will lead to an increase in efficiency. That's a growth mindset instead of a cut mindset. I think that's incredibly important to talk about with people inside of your organization to get buy-in on AI initiatives.
John Burris: And I think once they see that, when they see that they can do [00:03:00] the things that they were meant to do in a better way and increase our reach to our students they really get significantly more traction in their areas for adopting things like agentic AI into their business process.
Joe Toste: Okay.
Joe Toste: So you said a lot there. So I'm just gonna, I wanna unpack a little bit of this. We don't have a whole lot of time, but I do wanna unpack some of this. So let's talk about first getting buy-in. So easy to say, very hard to do. Can you just, for the leaders who will listen to this episode, can you just talk about.
Joe Toste: From a 30,000 foot overview, like how do you get buy-in from the chancellor or the CEO of the organization of the institution, across to your teams and the team members?
John Burris: So I feel like I've won the lottery in my leadership. Our president is very energetic, very not afraid of this type of innovation.
John Burris: But I will say that making sure they understand the priority. There's a lot of tools from Info-Tech about alignment with this really helped start that conversation. But I will say that you have to go in and you have to be very honest with your leadership. They need [00:04:00] to understand the risks that are associated with some of these initiatives.
John Burris: And it's a little bit different when we talk about AI because yes, we're gonna talk about the side of governance and ethics where we may talk about cybersecurity initiatives. With a very honest and open conversation about risk to the university. But when we're talking about AI initiatives, it's the risk of missing out.
John Burris: We are we need to be the early adopters in higher education. We all are aware of the enrollment cliff that we're facing, that we're gonna see a massive reduction in students that are coming to the university. So we have to position ourselves now when it comes to these efficiencies. And the types of efficiencies that we see.
John Burris: Things like mental health services, making sure that we touch each individual student. When you have a staff of, let's say seven or eight I'm sorry, I don't know the number that we have in our university counseling center, but when you have a smaller staff, they need ways to increase that engagement with students so that they can be more efficient in delivering their critical services.
John Burris: That's the type of efficiencies that we need. That's the type of [00:05:00] growth that we need. I need them to understand that missing out on those opportunities at this point is gonna be detrimental to the institution. And my president absolutely understands that, but there's also a lot of trust that's been built up between he and I and having those conversations.
John Burris: It started for me with cybersecurity and now it's grown into AI. And I feel like there's a lot of alignment there. And again, I'm gonna talk about Info-Tech. The tools for creating alignment with leadership are outstanding with what Info-Tech offers.
Joe Toste: Can you tell me a little bit more specifically what is it that makes Info-Tech special?
John Burris: So my background is in the nerdiest of the nerd parts of computer science, i'm talking about computability, non-determinism, those sorts of topics and the language that I speak is gonna be different than the CEO speaks. And this isn't one directional. I don't need my president to understand the language that I'm speaking.
John Burris: With my counselor and with the materials provided from Info-Tech, it pulls us closer to what I would consider a middle ground a common [00:06:00] language and how to speak. It makes me understand what the CEO has as their priorities that I need to understand when presenting my case. And that brings us into alignment because I'm understanding more about what the CEO is, is going to be bringing, and this is important for me without a background in business. I didn't climb up through the ranks of IT. I went from being an associate professor of computer science to being a CIO. The first thing I did on my job was Google. What does a CIO do? And this helps me understand not only beyond my office, but what are the institutional priorities?
John Burris: We're a service office. We, our mission is to support the mission and making sure that my communications with the CEO. If I have that approach that my mission is to support their mission. One of the things that my counselor especially helped me understand was that if I start the communication on those terms with my CEO, that I'm gonna have a much more productive conversation for getting my priorities listened to.
Joe Toste: I love that. Tom, I just wanted to jump to you. You've talked a lot about, and we talked about this in Miami too, but this AI super trend, [00:07:00] agentic super trend. And so I know you've given this quite a bit, but but for those who are not aware of it, can you just give us a short, not the full presentation, but just give us a little bit on Agentic AI, the next super trend, and then how you think it's gonna serve John at his university.
Tom Zehren: So let me start at two levels. Number one is there's about every 20 years there's a new era that we're entering in technology. So there was computerization, then there was digitization that we have all lived through for the last 20 years. And everybody talked about digital transformation and everything has to become digital.
Tom Zehren: Which was mostly using technology for automation, right? And now over the last two and a half years, we have entered a new era and we call that era, the era of autonomization. And in the era of autonomization you have organizational capability that are rendered completely autonomous, which is fundamentally different from everything that we have seen in the [00:08:00] past.
Tom Zehren: And right now we are only seeing the surface of that, right? So we talked about counseling services. We talked about human augmentation. We talked about tools that allow counselors to serve students in a more efficient way and in a better way, so they have a better holistic understanding of the student, and then they can, provide their coaching.
Tom Zehren: So now I'm not one of those doomsday colleagues that say, nobody's gonna have a job and everybody's gonna be sipping pina coladas because, everything is becoming autonomous. It's not what I'm talking about. But we see today very powerful AI tools in the counseling space.
Tom Zehren: Where a generation of students are living with digital avatars and those avatars are becoming their best friends, and that has a ton of up and downsides. So let's be clear about that. It's a new era that we have entered. We're not completely there yet. So when we talk about IT super [00:09:00] trends coming out of those, era of autonomization, we at Info-Tech really believe that Agentic AI is the next IT super trend.
Tom Zehren: And so super trends in IT only happen about every 10 to 20 years depending on how you cut it. Last one has certainly been cloud, where everybody, the, there's a couple of foundational technologies that have to come together to really enable cloud, right? And to drive the latency down to a level
Tom Zehren: that cloud actually becomes a feasible concept. Before it was impossible. So now you have Agentic AI where all the underlying technologies and you need always more of those to reach a certain stage of maturity have come together to allow that IT super trend of Agentic AI and Agentic AI to just make sure we're, I give you my definition and then we can of course beat this one up is that you have agents that have a higher level of autonomous decision making than a standard AI agent. It's not like many AI agents that you see [00:10:00] today are, it's a fancy word for an automated workflow. And so that automated workflow has existed before AI was there. And so now when you think about Agentic AI, it is really the level of autonomous decision making that you assign to Agentic AI systems.
Tom Zehren: And with that there is, there's a full new risk category that has evolved, which is the reason why, most organizations in the public sector, in the private sector are very careful of how to go there. But we really believe that's the future because if you think about the. Upsides and the benefits that an Agentic AI system can almost bring to almost all of your workflows.
Tom Zehren: It's just such a big opportunity similar to computers and similar to cloud that we are completely convinced that is what's gonna happen. So it's all about what's the timeline? How fast is it gonna go? How do we make sure we as humanity get it right? But it's certainly it's certainly there and it's not going away, and it's [00:11:00] gonna get bigger every day.
Joe Toste: I love that. John, jumping back to you now, I've got these two questions come to mind right now. One is, what's your favorite use case that at the university, and it could be internal for the staff or it could be for the students related to AI and then. Maybe five to 10 years out.
Joe Toste: Where what's a use case you're thinking, Hey, that could be, and I know I'm asking you to predict the future a little bit, but what's something that, you know, five to 10 years out that you're like, oh, that would be really good?
John Burris: I think the place that really stands out for me for the future is really with student advising.
John Burris: This is a serious concern for universities because there's so much that we know, there's so much institutional knowledge. We know that students don't. And social media really exposes this. If you look at student sites and they're questioning, what do I do if I miss an exam and how do I reach out?
John Burris: And this disconnect between our institutional knowledge and getting that information to students, they don't read their emails. They don't go out and search a website anymore. This is not how they consume information. This is not how they [00:12:00] access information. So I think the absolute use case that I would love to see the highest use case that I would love to see is getting our students more institutional knowledge and aware of what it is that we do.
John Burris: Right now, we're using that for employee and staff facing agents and this is really our, but it's a roadmap to get it to where it's student facing. We want these agents to be student facing. Right now we're just mostly focused on helping. Let's say with financial aid, whenever a new piece of legislation is offered things like faculty handbooks and policies, universities have policy websites that are pages and pages long.
John Burris: Having now well understood technologies like rags, accessing those policies, letting our faculty and staff know about what policies the university has, has been incredibly useful. We just need to get it to where it's student facing, because this is how our students are accessing this information already and we need to step up to that.
John Burris: That's my best use case.
Joe Toste: That's related to Info Tech's [00:13:00] HR a little bit. I think I heard a talk, maybe it was at Live in Las Vegas, but I love all of the different use cases and there's a lot of, I think, related HR to this. Financial aid or even external facing legislation laws, seems like everything changes daily or monthly.
Joe Toste: And that's actually when I was at EDUCAUSE, for the last couple years that was probably one of the top use cases from either smaller universities to large was how do we expose this to our students? How do we get them the resources faster?
Joe Toste: Because we only have seven on staff, right? We only have seven people on staff. And another one related to that was counseling. It wasn't that AI was counseling the kids, but it was all the administrative work that goes into prepping for those one-on-ones. And there's a lot. I think it's really interesting to see the possibilities right now. And I've got, I mean a lot of people here, I have a 16-year-old and she's looking at college, every [00:14:00] college right now, and it's okay, what are the resources? And how can they help her? But something that's been top of mind, whether in higher education. Or in local government or state agencies and very related to this is what is the role of the CIO gonna look like in the next five to 10 years. We talked about a lot of stuff getting automated, but I'd love to hear from you, John, around what do you think the role of the CIO is gonna be in the next five to 10 years?
John Burris: I think that's a really tough question to, to answer and I believe that as a CIO I am expected to provide more vision for the future of the university today than I was five years ago. Five years ago, we were selecting a new ERP system and that was as big of an influence as I have, right?
John Burris: And now it's not about networking speed. It's not how people access wifi. It's not even about protecting our customers with multifactor authentication. And these things are assumed now. Now, I believe that the institution is relying more on the CIO for [00:15:00] providing the vision of the future of the university.
John Burris: We have this council, the university planning council, which provides every five years of vision. So we just got done with Vision 2025. We're looking at Vision 2030 and more and more we're talking about AI's place, not just in the classroom, but in the administration of the university. And I think that's just fundamentally different than it was when we were in 2020 planning Vision 2025.
John Burris: We were much more focused on what happens in that face-to-face classroom? What happens when we onboard people and assign them dorm rooms? What about the beautification of campus? Those things matter. But for my role now, I'm being asked how do we increase the quality of pedagogy with AI in our learning management system?
John Burris: This is not something that I expected two years ago to be asked in a university planning council.
Joe Toste: So Tom, you've had a lot of these types of conversations. How are you either advising or what are you hearing that are maybe some non-obvious [00:16:00] insights from across. It could be public sector, can be private sector, but what are you hearing from the role of the CIO that a lot of folks are thinking about? What does this role look like as it moves from er, just managing the ERP to really transforming the organization?
Tom Zehren: So let me start off with saying that I believe that the CIO is the absolute hardest job in the C-suite. So when you think about CFO, if you think about VP of external affairs, if you think about even a chancellor, right? So if you think about, or the provost, you think through all the roles at a university or if you now think about a private sector, all of those worlds have gone through a lot of transformation.
Tom Zehren: So if you talk to CFOs or chief procurement officers, et cetera, everybody's gonna say my job has changed so much. The velocity of change in society is accelerating which happens because of technology and we all have to make far more decisions every day, and we get more information every day.
Tom Zehren: But I really believe that the velocity of [00:17:00] change to the role of the CIO is at the highest level across the organization. And so then of course that cascades that, then up to the CEO, so you know that part of it for sure. So CIO is the hardest job. Second, I do believe that all organizations have to become technology first organizations in the future if they're not already today.
Tom Zehren: And why is that? Because today everything is technology. You can go into every single organization that is out there. Yesterday I talked to someone who who's a chain- Sage Dental Management. So they have over 400 dental practices across the North America and they're buying like more and more of them, and it's all about technology.
Tom Zehren: And why are they outperforming competitors? According to the CIO it's because they have 3D printing capabilities on site and they can 3D print crowns same day. And so you don't have a delay of a month. And so [00:18:00] that's where customers go there or patients in that case so what I'm getting at is even if you go to an ice cream store, it's all about the checkout system and how do you actually make sure you have enough ice cream, et cetera.
Tom Zehren: So everything today is a technology organization, if you like it or not. I will argue even the farm to a certain extent. So we can talk about that. And now the question becomes. Who is leading that transformation of an organization towards a technology first organization. And that is naturally the CIO.
Tom Zehren: Who else will it be? So now the two challenges are in the public sector, there, there should be competition, but there is competition because if you have other state universities that are far ahead. That's where just all the students are gonna go. And at some point then, universities are forced to merge because it's all about cost cutting and et cetera.
Tom Zehren: So that's then the future of that. So in the public sector it's exactly as important as it is in the private sector for my, from my point of view. And now the second one, which [00:19:00] I think is the biggest challenge for CIOs. Historically, the role of the CIO was not really in question.
Tom Zehren: Like someone needed to take care of technology. People understood that, and then for 20 years, CIOs were fighting for a seat at the table, right? I'm no longer reporting into the CFO, I really want to be part of the C-suite. How can I make sure I have a voice in those type of conversations?
Tom Zehren: Because , it really matters not from an ego perspective, but it's very important for the organization that voice is at the table because technology is now such a big part of it. So today. The challenge with the rise of Agentic AI is that all functions, in this case of a university really are fighting for technology resources because they hear about all those use cases.
Tom Zehren: They get all these type of questions from staff, from faculty from students, and they're like, we want to provide those services because we think that is actually really good. And so as a CIO, [00:20:00] you are now bombarded with all of those requests, and historically, yes, you also had a ton of requests, but I will argue it was probably five x less in terms of the volume, and it was probably 10 x less from a complexity standpoint of the questions that are not coming because people believe AI can do everything right?
Tom Zehren: And, so now the future of the CIO. So our prediction at Info-Tech is you basically have, two passes and then the second pass offers you some options. So let me start with the second one is, the second one is what we call an exponential IT leader. A CIO who is really leaning into the curve of technology change and is adapting and driving their organization forward to a technology first organization.
Tom Zehren: So I think great examples that you've given in terms of like how you're doing that. Then obviously there are CIOs who don't want to do that, who don't believe in it, or are not acting fast enough. Our prediction is that those CIOs are gonna be pushed down [00:21:00] into almost a VP of technology infrastructure role, which is mostly around basic infrastructure and, financial admin in terms of the load and the cost that come with that infrastructure.
Tom Zehren: But everything that has a student facing or staff facing or customer facing layer. Is basically moving into the business functions or in, in the functions of the university because all functional leaders within the university, including the provost, are now stepping up to really using technology to drive their cause.
Tom Zehren: And so if IT cannot provide that, and if the CIO cannot provide that, then those capabilities have to still exist for the university, but they're going to get built outside of IT. So that's the doomsday case for CIO s again, if you want that's your choice, but it's not very appealing from, the ambition and aspiration that comes with that. With the exponential IT leader as the CIO, it really embraces those [00:22:00] technologies and creates a lot of value for the organization. It opens up a ton of career opportunities and passes that have never existed before. One is taking over other departments that historically would've never fallen into the IT area because they just need technology leadership.
Tom Zehren: And if it's very scarce to find people who are what I call hybrid unicorns, like the people who really understand the business side of the equation, in this case, how teaching works and the technology side of the equation. So usually you find people who are either very good at technology side or very good at one of the functional domain areas.
Tom Zehren: But the future in my mind from a skill perspective is being hybrid technology leaders. They understand technology, they understand how to use it, they understand how to build it. And they understand how they create value out of that. And so those exponential IT leaders, like the CIOs of the future, or we have many cases already today for them, there is a myriad of career opportunities, be it moving into the business, becoming, CEO [00:23:00] or chancellor of a university because the chancellor also needs to be technology first and from an orientation perspective.
Joe Toste: Thank you, Tom. I do really appreciate that. As we close this out, as we round this out, John Tom, I'd just love to hear from you real quick. What's one round table topic that you would love to either participate in or, or a podcast episode that you would love to listen in on?
Joe Toste: Is there a topic that's top of mind that you would love right now?
John Burris: I'll start and say that early on in at Info-Tech Live we talked about the qualities or I heard it, it talked about the qualities as we move away from IQ to valuing EQ more, that has been, it is gigantic letters in my, my Info-Tech live notebook of things that I want to explore. I think there were a lot of interesting statements made that with AI intelligence is there and in, in my field of computer science, we've been producing graduates where we focus on soft skills and that EQ component of it. And I have to say that's something that's gonna be in the next few weeks, something that I deep dive [00:24:00] into this idea of AQ for sure.
Tom Zehren: That's great. That was my answer as well.
Joe Toste: It's a classic Tom answer. I love that. With that, thank you for coming on the TechTables Podcast, Live at Info-Tech in New Orleans. Thank you both.
Tom Zehren: Thank you.