Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Infovarsity, the official podcast of Syracuse University School of Information Studies. Today, we're joined by Frank Ionella, Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Digital and Technology at the Heineken Company.
Speaker: Frank leads digital transformation across a global organization, spanning areas like supply chain, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and data. He's also a Syracuse alum who has stayed closely connected to the iSchool community, helping support student experiences like Eurotech.
Speaker: Today, We'll talk about his path into tech, how AI is actually being used inside organizations today, and what students should be thinking about as they prepare to enter the industry.
Speaker: You started as a biology major at Syracuse. What led you to get into the tech space? Well, interestingly enough, my first few years at Syracuse, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do.
Speaker: but I knew that I was interested in the sciences. So I landed up ah taking some biology classes and landed up loving it. And I actually still love science to this to this day. But at that time, i I took some biology classes. I landed up moving into a pre-med track.
Speaker: And for the rest of my time at Syracuse was ah you know basically a science you know science degree. But it was after after i graduated,
Speaker: when I was you know thinking about that I want to go to medical school or not, that I i said, you know what, let me let's get into industry. So I went to a pharmaceutical company and I was actually in New Jersey. i lived in i lived in New York at the time and I started just working in a lab. I was in a microbiology lab, a pharmaceutical company down at down in New Jersey. And then I started working on some Excel based products at the time it was Lotus one, two, three, right. mean, just a a different, a different product, but I just started exploring from there. And I realized I really enjoyed working with software and with technology.
Speaker: And then at that time, it just so happened my soon to be wife and I moved to Colorado and i I was starting to look for a job. And I said, after talking to my father-in-law and others, hey, why don't I try something in tech? And I did. I got into a software company, an HR software company out of Denver, Colorado, and it was the best thing that happened because then at that point I got into tech and I loved it from there.
Speaker: There's a lot of conversation around AI right now. What does real AI adoption actually look like inside of Heineken? Yeah, so Heineken, You know, Heineken is it's a multinational company, 160 years old.
Speaker: um It's got a great brand. It's family run, you know, to start 160 years ago, based out of out of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And um we we've, from the beginning, been using AI. I mean, like for for a decade or longer, we've been using AI, mainly with, you know, machine learning and automation.
Speaker: But when generative AI was introduced, and that's really where things kicked off, ah we embraced it like as a company, you know both in the in in in the Netherlands, but also in the U.S., which is where I'm mainly focused.
Speaker: We embraced it, which means we started testing, we started it exploring. But I think what's important for us was it was it's a new tech, but how did it apply to our business? like How can we actually solve business problems with it?
Speaker: So we had previously created a long list of use cases by function, you know, by ah HR and finance and marketing and sales of the types of challenges that we were trying to solve.
Speaker: And we literally took that same list and we now started applying this, you know, this optic of Gen AI to say, okay, how would Gen change how we approach this problem and how we can solve it? So over the years, and it's been three year journey, we started very small.
Speaker: We started creating like low little small chatbots for the back office because now you had a way to you know create an AI model over on top of unstructured data and documents and so on. So we started there, but then we started moving more towards supply chain.
Speaker: And that was probably one of our biggest successes is using AI to help us with inventory. And with out-of-stock management, you know making sure we don't have out-of-stocks of our product in in retail outlets or or in yeah retail outlets. so And at that point, it's constantly just building and learning and growing, not trying to solve it all and also do something highly disruptive without really understanding what it was. And I'm glad we did that because then we started doing things where it was a little external facing.
Speaker: When it's internal facing and something breaks, that's okay, right? You can you can handle it. When it's external facing and breaks, that's different. These are your customers. This is the public, the consumers. So we started smaller with some of our distributors. They order our products through a particular portal and we introduced chat bot we introduced ways for them also to interact.
Speaker: And that's been successful. And now I would say because of some of these successes and and the experimentation we've done, We now have AI projects across every one of our functions in HR, let's say in legal, how they look at contracts, how they review contracts can actually be greatly improved by the use of AI. So we're doing that in marketing, how you create content, how you create what you see in a commercial or how you you know work through the life cycle of a campaign.
Speaker: we're using AI and we're we're validating some of that. So it's not all in production, some of it's still experimenting and piloting, but we're at a really good place to now see how this technology can improve.
Speaker: So I would say to answer your question, you know it's we're it's all we're all in, right? We're all in, we've had some successes, but still some things for us to learn in order to really maximize the technology.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's I think what with the big unlock is, for all of us, it's that natural natural language interface. I think that's what is a huge unlock because it used to be if I needed to build a machine learning algorithm, you know, I got program that. You need special skills to do that.
Speaker: And now that they've kind of created this abstract layer of generative AI where you can use natural language, it's opened up to a lot of people. So now you have people building and doing things that are not, they're not necessarily technical people. They're able to now build and do things they never were never were able to do before.
Speaker: You've spoken about the need to balance innovation with responsible implementation. How does that play out in practice, particularly in a global environment with varying regulations and expectations?
Speaker: Yeah, so from the beginning, Like every technologist, I was super excited about the technology and i'm usually the you know the the curious one, the the one who wants to go experiment and at least understand it and very excited about it.
Speaker: But in ah in an opera in a organization, like in a company environment, you have to you have to think about, like you said, the not only just the regulations, but just Are you ready? Is your data ready? Is your governance ready? Are your processes ready for introducing something like this? And the answer in the beginning is actually no. In some cases, we're not.
Speaker: Like we were on a journey of solving or or cleaning our data before Generative AI came out. But once it came out, it like, accelerated the need to get on top of our data and make sure that it's governed and clean and we have very clear processes and monitoring its quality.
Speaker: um So I think when I think of responsible AI, I think of, hey, there's responsibility in terms of the foundational things that you need to make sure it's going to run so that you're you're not putting something on something that's broken, right? So that's first part. So the foundational piece, then there's the other component, which is from a security standpoint, from a ethical standpoint.
Speaker: So there are things that we realize we can now do with ai where we had to bring in a legal team. We had to bring in our cyber team. We had to, we had to start talking about, let's say I create a new image using AI.
Speaker: Well, in a corporation, it's actually a potential liability of you putting out something that's generated AI because was it being derived from something that has IP or is it,
Speaker: Maybe um an ethical question of exactly what you're using. Are you using somebody's work that now is incorporated into your into your work? And ethically, is that the right thing to do? So there's a lot of these questions that started appearing that we didn't really know about until we dove in and say, hey, let's make sure we're doing this in responsible way.
Speaker: So what we did was we created we created a cross-functional team and created a policy. Right, an AI policy. It wasn't a hundred page document. It's like literally a two page document, but it provided some very clear guidelines for how we were going to use AI, how we wanted our vendors to use AI, and also the employee base. We rolled out Microsoft Copilot so everybody could have this in their hands.
Speaker: um We wanted to make sure it was clear to them, here are the guardrails, right? You are using a very powerful technology now. The data that we have in our company could now be shared and used to build other models, which we may not want to happen.
Speaker: So how do we make sure we protect that? um So, yeah, there's a lot of excitement about what you can do with AI, and we're we're we're all in. But at the same time, you have to think about the other side. You have to think about the the responsible side of it.
Speaker: You've worked across areas like supply chain, e-commerce, and innovation. What connects all of that in your work? So going back, you know, right from an early part of my career, when I was at a, at that software company to, when i I, I moved to PepsiCo, I was PepsiCo for, you know, 22 years and doing something different, probably every three, three to four years.
Speaker: I think the thread for me, when I think back has been, you know, how, First of all, how do i make sure I understand the business? Like I'm a technologist, but I consider myself more of a business forward technologist, meaning the tech itself, I'm not gonna jump on a sword for a specific package or platform, but how you use that platform to solve a problem is more important to me.
Speaker: So I think when I look back, it was always how to solve problems, how to find opportunities within business, leveraging technology. So a lot of the areas I've been in, it's been across the entire corporation, all functions plus innovation. I've been on the cyber side.
Speaker: I think it's always around how do i enable the business that we're in using the tools that we have available to us? And with ai now it feels supercharged, right? You have this really powerful new capability, which almost feels like it has cognitive ability.
Speaker: How do you now apply that to solve business problems and find opportunities. So the common thread for me, when I think back is that is doesn't matter what function I was in They all gave me different experiences and learnings, but I was always trying to find opportunities and solve problems. ah we We have ah we have a role on our team. They're called a business solutions manager.
Speaker: They're almost like an account manager that works with each of the functions. So I have somebody who might be working with sales or with marketing. And when somebody comes into that role, you know, the the one part of the role is executing projects.
Speaker: Okay, you need to learn project management that how do I execute a project? And there's a scientific part to that. um But on the other side of it, we also talk about shaping and helping the business understand how to use technology.
Speaker: The only way you get there is exactly what you said, which is you have to know it. You have to really, you almost have to know it better than they do when you look at a function to know what the opportunities are to help them.
Speaker: Because most of them are just trying to run the business, right? They're trying to just day in and day out, pay the bills, get the product out, ah you know, ship the product. And you're in there trying to find ways to help them and enable them.
Speaker: And that's why as it professionals, um, you need to be able to listen. You need to be able to ask questions. You need to be able to think a little bit broader to see how things tie together.
Speaker: Cause if I go talk to a salesperson, well, sales is not just by themselves. Yes, they go sell, but they are heavily connected with marketing. They're heavy, heavily connected with finance. They're heavily connected with operations. And if the product's even going to be on the shelf. So you have to have,
Speaker: a listening skill, but also this idea of how do you connect some of these points together? Because that's where the opportunities are, right? Is is is in knowing that. I think there's also structurally in a company, how do you separate out the execution and operations of a company versus the transformation, right? If you want to change something, like we're on a project right now, changing sales, like how they go to market data that they have, how they talk to customers.
Speaker: they have to sell. they' There's still targets that they have right now that they have to deliver, but you almost need like a parallel project, parallel team that are thinking about how to transform and then change the organization, which which takes which takes time.
Speaker: When leading large scale transformation, what tends to be the biggest challenge? Yeah. And this is super straightforward for me because I've seen it many times.
Speaker: um It's people. people are the hardest to change. We as humans are resistant to change. And yes, I'm the type of person who's very curious and I i actually love change, but in general, as humans, like we we kind of get comfortable in certain things. We feel comfortable. We have like security blankets. And when you try to introduce a change to an organization, either it's a small organization, organization a small change could be a new strategy, or it could be a whole new system or a new way of doing things.
Speaker: There's always some level of resistance to it. And it comes from sometimes unexpected quarters. It could be people who you're thinking that, you know, they love change and all a sudden they get this change and then then they're not excited about it anymore. And you're trying to figure it out. So the biggest challenges for transformation in my experience has been ah the people within the organization. Uh, and that includes the leaders. It doesn't mean just worker. It's every it's everybody kind of getting their head around what that means for them and why is it valuable for them to suffer pain because it is transforming usually it involves some level of pain to actually, to actually get there. And I think there's, um,
Speaker: There's ways to to to to mitigate it, right? I think if you go into a project and you have the right support and you have the right leadership and you have the right amount of funding, I think you can absolutely mitigate how that happens and rolls out.
Speaker: But there are plenty of examples of transformations that got that went terribly wrong. It was less around the technology and it was more around the change management, the people accepting whatever it was that was rolling out just didn't fit their expectations. So that to me will never, i don't think that's ever going to change, whether it's AI or the next version of Agentic, whatever else is comes out, that's gonna be a very common problem that we have to face in transformations.
Speaker: You supported iSchool Eurotech immersion trip by coordinating a visit to Heineken in Amsterdam. What do you hope students take away from seeing a global company up close?
Speaker: i I just think we are surrounded and living in this digital era where everything is digital, where we're constantly on our phones, we're in front of a computer, where where we're just in this digital world. And that's just the reality of it. And it's both work and play.
Speaker: And the idea of having real life experiences, especially for the students, and they're coming, I know they're coming this August. to Amsterdam to have this experience is a way to see how a business operates.
Speaker: I mean, going to Amsterdam for Heineken, this is where it started. And I've been there multiple times. There's a lot of history there. And to see how this business, how does you know how do you get the barley? How do you make the the beer?
Speaker: How do you market the beer? How do you distribute the beer? How do you know how do you do these things? I think is ah it's invaluable to see that in real life. So that's my hope, is that the students will have that experience. They'll be able to see how a company works.
Speaker: They'll be able to feel some of the history of of that company and the pride that that that we have, and to see it in real life with their with their peer students and having a real experience. And I'm hoping, and I think for any of the students that are listening,
Speaker: I think that's something that we should be embracing in this digital age is how do we get experiences? Because those experiences are the ones that you're going to learn the most from. What should students be focusing on right now if they want to work in a role like yours?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question because I've had conversations with my some friends about this and peers about it. The path that I took to get to this role that I'm in is changing drastically. Like right now, you know, I went from a programmer to a help desk person, to a tester, to an implementation lead, to a trainer, to leading projects, project manager.
Speaker: Like I did that within like a six, seven year period. Nowadays that, that doesn't exist necessarily because it's either all outsourced or it's being done by service providers.
Speaker: And that level of experiences is harder to get. So what i what I would say is that people now, if they want to get into leadership at some point, executive leadership, they have to get experiences. Like I was saying before, build stuff, support stuff, um work with cross-functional teams,
Speaker: and understand what it takes to kind of do something together. Doing something individual has its own gratification. I've been a developer. i understand there's some fun in that and developing it, but moving up into doing larger projects and and taking on leadership roles, you're always gonna be working with people. You're always gonna be working in cross-functional environments.
Speaker: You have to find ways to do that and do it early. So you know how to navigate. The other thing I would say is finding out what you're good at and having some level of self-awareness. When I was just out of college, I had none of that. i really i knew i was I knew I liked something and I liked science, but I didn't really think about it that way.
Speaker: Like, hey, what are you good at? What do you like doing? I think the earlier students that are coming out of school do that, the better they're going to be prepared when they're figuring out what's that job they want to get, what's the next opportunity they want.
Speaker: because they now know where they're going to fit in and they're going to be getting these great experiences that'll help grow them. And that's how you'll grow. And that's how you take on more responsibility is by being really good at those things, delivering things, working with others and showing that you at the end can become a leader. And that to me is a path, but the traditional way, especially in it, t is morphing very quickly. And in some cases, i don't even know what it's going to look like in the next five to 10 years. But I think there's some common things that they people, you know, students can do.
Speaker: What's something about your role that might surprise people? I would say i surprisingly spend
Speaker: maybe the least amount of my time on technology. i don't know. It sounds crazy, but Tech is always there, right? But where I spend my time and the role that I'm in, it's all people.
Speaker: It's the people on my leadership team and working with them and making sure that they're navigating through organizational challenges. And I didn't think about leadership or people people management until, i don't even know, maybe my late 20s or 30s. Like, I just wasn't thinking about it. And I think that's an advantage for students here nowadays to know that they should be thinking about it earlier. They they should be.
Speaker: um You don't need to be a you know a a CIO executive leader day one, but you're starting to build your toolkit and the the skill sets needed so that you will be ready as you start taking on some more responsibilities. And you're not an individual contributor. One of the biggest challenges I find are technical people who are individual contributors, very good at technology, but they need to make that transition into a leadership role, which usually includes more money, more responsibility, but that shift is difficult.
Speaker: So the earlier students can think about what that looks like. I think they're, they have an advantage. In a meeting tech came up maybe once for 10 minutes. And the other three and a half, waiting on three hours, 50 minutes was focused on business challenge around our portfolio, around how we're going to market around different types of products.
Speaker: And so I would think that would probably surprise people is to think maybe that's where I'm spending my time. Maybe they think I'm spending my time more in tech. um And I read a lot.
Speaker: I read a lot about tech i and I interact. I was just at a dinner last night. talking to other CIO leaders around AI and how they're applying it. But for the most part, it's people, it's a people business, right? It's a people role and how you navigate that.
