Bringing the Needle in the Haystack to You: How Modern CIOs Manage Complexity

In this episode, Triad hosts Jessica Lidh and Kristin Rydland welcome Tom Andriola, Field CIO, AI Executive, and Healthcare Strategic Leader at Dynatrace. With decades of experience as a CIO at organizations including the University of California and Philips Healthcare, Tom shares how the CIO role has evolved from keeping “the trains running on time” to becoming a strategic business leader and translator between technology and mission. He discusses the importance of strategy as a fluid conversation—not a rigid process—and introduces the concept of a “bimodal workforce” where humans and AI agents work side by side. Tom explains how Dynatrace fits into this new world by providing visibility, intelligence, and automation that help organizations move from reactive firefighting to proactive problem-solving. He emphasizes that trust is the real bottleneck for AI adoption, and that leaders must create psychological safety for their teams to take risks and innovate. Tom also shares what excites him most about Dynatrace’s future—including recent partnerships and acquisitions—and why every organization, from banks to DMVs, is now a digital enterprise that can benefit from data, intelligence, and automation. His core message: AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI better than you might—so lean in, get on the field, and start playing.

The Bimodal Workforce: Humans and AI Agents Working Together:

“The opportunity I like to talk to CIOs about is, think about this bimodal workforce you can now get into the game of, which is, you have carbon-based units, and I like to call them silicon-based units, and they’re now both executing a set of workflows and processes… if you start to change that mentality, you start to say, look, instead of trying to add 3 people to the team, let’s bring in technology that allows us to aggregate data, build intelligence on top of it, then automate certain aspects of the work… I don’t need to ask for more people. I need to ask for more consumption… because what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna automate things, and actually, over time, when two people leave me, I’m gonna be in a position to not have to refill those people.”

No Fast Tracks: The AI Journey Is Like the Game of Life:

“I talk about this journey… the AI journey, to me, is a lot more like playing the game of life than the games of chutes and ladders. Everyone’s looking for the ladder, the fast track themselves, and I keep telling people, there are no fast tracks here. You gotta travel the road. You can’t talk about agentic AI without fundamentally going back and understanding that data and data governance is extremely important if you want value from Agentic AI… and CIOs understand that. The question usually is, like, how do I explain that to my CEO, right, or my executive director, who just came back from the conference and says, we’re doing AI… Make it happen.”

AI Won’t Take Your Job—But Someone Who Knows AI Better Might:

“These tools are coming into our world in the way that tools have always come into our world… it bodes well for anyone thinking about their future to lean in, understand these tools, figure out how to use them, because AI taking your job is a lot less plausible than the person who knows how to use this tool better than you.”

From “Searching for the Needle” to “Bring Me the Needle”

“Part of what the Dynatrace platform does is bringing visibility through the level of telemetry of how is things running… the entire tech stack… We actually know, like, it’s on its way towards failure… the mean time to detect we’ve shrunk in half thanks to having Dynatrace here, and so instead of the customer calling us, or the citizen calling us and telling us that I can’t do my authorization, we actually know that beforehand, and we fixed it before the citizen even saw the impact.”

Bring Me the Needle: Intelligence Over Firefighting:

“We’re in 2026. The idea of having an outage and sending off your two next levels of management to go find the needle in the haystack, to come back into a war room of 40 people, to then argue over, the problem’s not with my network, it’s with your Azure environment—that’s 20 years ago thinking. You should say, bring me the needle. Bring me the what and why, and now we’ll fix it.”

From IT Tool to Enterprise-Wide Operating System:

“It starts as an IT thing. But it becomes something that you run across the enterprise. And that’s what happened with ServiceNow. It was just doing ITSM, right? But now it drives HR, and it drives operations… I see it becoming a larger and larger way of the way organizations are thinking about running efficiently around their mission.”