Ready for the Next Pitch: Innovating in the Age of Intelligence   

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to innovation isn’t technology. It’s the way we’ve trained ourselves to work.

As I approach my first anniversary as chief marketing officer at DXC Technology, I’ve been thinking a lot about intelligence and the habits that allow people and organizations to innovate. And strangely enough, I keep coming back to something I learned long before AI, the internet or my career in marketing.

Baseball.

I started playing when I was four years old — I wanted to play so badly that I talked my way onto the field before I was technically old enough to play, and I stayed there all the way through college. Baseball taught me discipline and teamwork, but also how to listen, anticipate and react.

Those habits have stayed with me, from growing up around New York’s film and advertising business to the early internet, and now, artificial intelligence. After a year as CMO, I’m convinced that innovation is driven less by having all the answers than by developing the habits that help us discover them.

Early in my career, I worked with companies building websites when Netscape was new, e-commerce was unproven, and the internet felt like the Wild West. I remember people saying, “I’m never going to put my credit card on the internet.”

It sounds funny now. But I hear echoes of that same type of fear when people talk about AI today.

People are mostly afraid of what they don’t know. Innovative organizations resist the temptation to wait until everything is understood. They create room to experiment responsibly.

With the intelligence evolving so quickly, waiting for certainty can mean waiting too long.

One of my biggest lessons at DXC is that AI forces us to rethink a basic business instinct: our love of processes.

We create workflows, systems, meetings and steps — and then spend enormous amounts of time managing them.

My advice is to start with the outcome. Don’t begin with every step required to get there. Ask: What are we actually trying to achieve? Do I need to reinvent X? Solve Y? Then determine how intelligence can help achieve that outcome.

Think about how much time employees spend searching for information — digging through email, looking for a PowerPoint, opening SharePoint or logging into multiple systems.

What if we flipped that equation? What if 90% of our time could be focused on what we actually want to accomplish rather than finding what we need to accomplish it?

That changes more than productivity. It changes what people are capable of doing.

You cannot lead an intelligence transformation from a PowerPoint deck.

At DXC, we’ve made ourselves what we call “Customer Zero.” We use AI inside our own operations first, find what works and what breaks, and fix it before we ever bring it to a customer. Within marketing and communications, we are embedding AI into how our teams work, supported by shared knowledge, guidelines and guardrails. 

I am personally utilizing it as well, writing my own agents and experimenting with generative AI. I believe you have to use the technology to understand it, embrace it and get into the details. 

Innovation cannot be something leaders ask other people to do.

But putting intelligence into an old operating model does not automatically create a new organization. You have to change how people work.

At DXC, we’ve reorganized parts of marketing so teams can operate more holistically rather than as independent groups. That reflects our wider Xponential Enterprise approach: connecting technology with people and processes to deliver speed, quality, and scale.

This year’s U.S. Open Tennis Championships is the springboard for launching our new Xponential brand campaign, featuring optimistic network commercials, targeted digital and social campaigns that tell stories about how people use technology to drive real outcomes.

The objective isn’t AI for AI’s sake. It is turning intelligence into measurable enterprise value.

Most people have experienced consumer-grade AI. However, running AI across a global bank, airline, insurer or government organization is something else entirely. It requires production-grade intelligence that is secure, resilient, and governed.

DXC works across an open ecosystem of AI partners, choosing the right model for each use case rather than locking into a single provider. For instance, DXC and Anthropic recently announced a multi-year alliance to bring Claude into mission-critical enterprise systems DXC operates for the world’s largest banks, airlines, insurers, manufacturers, and government agencies. 

DXC is now one of the few Global Premier partners in the Claude Partner Network. Claude is one of the AI models behind the agentic workflows in DXC OASIS, our AI-native orchestration platform for managed services, now in production across more than 50 customers. Using Claude, DXC accelerated DXC OASIS software delivery by an estimated 10 times, with more than 95% of its code generated by Claude before human review.

That is the difference between experimenting with intelligence and putting it to work.

I grew up around the film business and later moved into advertising. I know what it traditionally takes to produce sophisticated creative work: large teams, specialized skills, significant budgets and long timelines.

Today, I see teams of three skilled people accomplishing work that once might have required dozens.

That doesn’t make human expertise less important. It makes expertise more powerful.

AI allows skilled individuals to produce at a fidelity and scale we have never had before. But you still need experience, judgment and people who know what good looks like.

That’s why I don’t see AI simply as a replacement technology. I see it as an amplification technology — consistent with our Human+ philosophy of combining intelligent systems with human expertise.

After nearly a year as CMO, I’ve realized that the organizations most likely to succeed with AI won’t necessarily be those with the biggest technology budgets or boldest announcements.

They will be the organizations that make innovation habitual.

Listen. Stay curious. Get comfortable with uncertainty. Focus on outcomes. Use the technology yourself. Change how teams work. And recognize that experienced people become even more valuable when technology amplifies what they can do.

The internet connected the world. Mobile put that connection into billions of hands. Now, advanced intelligence is at our fingertips.

If baseball taught me anything, it’s that eventually someone is going to hit a line drive your way.

You have to be ready to make the play.