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Imagine going from building cars one by one to building cars in less than a minute. That’s how Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti says his company and others have to now handle data. From calculating batches of data daily, or micr0-batches hourly, now the whole infrastructure of the company has to adapt and process a tsunami of data in real time. “The organization has to move on a heartbeat,” he says. “When you move computing to where the data is because you don’t have time to move data around, that’s a revolution in how things are architected.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Forbes, Argenti also spoke about the shift to confidential computing—where the “confidentiality of your data in the cloud is guaranteed, down to the chips level”—and the “unprecedented” leap in data analytics that could enable some business processes to be run and adapted to real-time circumstances by AI.
Along with transforming the role of the engineer and CIO, he argues that technology shifts are rewiring how the organization comes together. The former Amazon Web Services executive has taken a page from his former employer in how he’s positioned his function at Goldman.
“In the same way that AWS offers a cloud of IT services, we offer a cloud of financial services,” says Argenti. “Going from engineering as a support to providing external services that generate recurring revenue is a transformation.”
What he also learned from Amazon is that customer obsession is something that you have to measure—and iterate based on how customers are actually interacting with the business.
Argenti takes inspiration from his days at Nokia for a different reason. “Nokia taught me that you need to be conscious and alert of industry transformation,” he says, noting the rapidity with which the company went from being the dominant maker of smartphones to one that struggled to stay in the game. “It’s about being alert and have a challenger mentality,” he argues. “Goldman never takes anything for granted.”
While AI has the power to be transformative, he argues, it’s simply a copilot in executing on a vision for where the company is going. A potentially greater challenge for CIOs is helping C-suite peers understand the fundamental shift in how computing and data moves through the company, and the need to adapt in a matter of seconds. As he puts it: “This year, more than ever, we really need to put technology at the center of what we do.”
For more, click on the interview above.
