Over the past decade, digital transformation has been positioned as the key to unlocking efficiency, scalability, and long-term growth. But what if the outcomes don’t match the promise?
Andreas Beeres, CIO of Corporate Information Technology at SCHOTT AG, will bring a rather critical perspective to CIOmove: a look at why recent digital strategies – from cloud to AI – may be accelerating IT spend, not business value.
Questioning the Economic Narrative
Beeres challenges a widely accepted assumption: that digital transformation is inherently a driver of economic efficiency. In his view, key components of the current transformation playbook are failing to deliver on their promised returns.
Take the cloud-first approach. Once a dominant strategy, many companies are now slowing down or even reversing their cloud migrations. Unexpected cost structures, complex governance requirements, and lack of flexibility have led to re-evaluations – especially in industries with tight margins and high regulatory demands.
AI: Automation Without Savings?
While AI vendors promise reduced headcount and streamlined operations through autonomous systems, Beeres sees a different picture emerging. The costs of deploying, scaling, and governing AI systems are rising – and not just in infrastructure. Training, integration, data quality management, and compliance bring new layers of complexity that often offset the savings promised by automation.
In this model, the economic winners are cloud and software vendors, not the companies implementing the tools.
Locked In, Paying More
Beeres argues that digital transformation as it is currently practiced too often reinforces vendor dependency. The combination of cloud-centric architectures and proprietary AI solutions risks creating ecosystems that are difficult – and expensive – to exit. The result: rising IT costs, higher strategic risk, and little to show in terms of real efficiency gains.
His CIOmove session will invite discussion around one central idea: perhaps the time has come to rethink the economic assumptions behind cloud/AI transformation itself.
