My Agentic “Aha!” Moment: The Question Every CIO Wants Answered

I’m a relentless optimist. It’s the source of my drive and energy. But it also comes with a cost. When reality doesn’t keep pace with my vision, frustration creeps in.

But I’ve developed a way of accounting for that. Each quarter, I do a simple exercise I call optimism calibration: I evaluate areas of my work where I was over-aspirational. And reflect on what I learned from those moments.

Looking back on the past few months, one thing stood out to me as needing some calibration: the pace of our agentic development.

Excitement Doesn’t Equal Execution

I returned from our agentic hackathon in October inspired by the art of the possible. Twenty-two Nasuni colleagues from 13 different functions had spent four days in Palo Alto and come back with 32 agent prototypes, ready to be moved into production. They’d smashed even my most ambitious goals to pieces. Our vision had been accelerated. My optimism was vindicated.

But within just a few days of our return, that momentum had faded. We delivered on three of those proof of concepts, but our progress was nowhere near the velocity I had expected. So as part of my quarterly calibration, I wanted to understand exactly what went wrong — and put it right.

Our Greatest Strength Was Our Achilles Heel

As I reflected, I realized that our greatest strength had also been our achilles heel. Bringing IT together with domain specialists was what made the hackathon such a success, by pushing the technology closer to the business. But when we returned, those same people who had been pivotal to bringing the pilots to life, went back to their day jobs. To their own departments’ KPIs and objectives. And AI wasn’t part of their mandates. In truth, it wasn’t part of mine either. Within IT, we have strong teams across data, security, and operations, but no dedicated AI and automation function.

Zeroing In On The Missing Piece

With the pieces beginning to come into focus, I decided to pressure-test my thinking. I called up Vijay Tella, CEO of our automation partner, Workato, and asked him the question foremost in every CIO’s mind:

“How have you gotten to value with AI at scale?”

His answer came without hesitation or ambiguity:

“The only thing we think about every single day is how to optimize our business with AI. It’s our core competency.”

That was the “Aha! moment”. We had the tools. We had the opportunity. We had the framework. We just didn’t have the people. All of our AI resources had been fractional — when they should have been dedicated. So I set about building the team that would fill that gap.

Building Nasuni’s First Dedicated AI Team

I hired a technical leader in the U.S. to architect and oversee our AI and business integrations. Two business analysts focused entirely on working with domain experts to identify where AI could most effectively absorb greywork and free humans for higher-value thinking. And a team of six engineers located at our India Innovation Center in Hyderabad to deliver on those opportunities.

Nine people with one sole focus: AI and automation.

Moving from Experimentation to Execution

Within two months, I believe we’ll have agents integrated end-to-end across our highest-priority workflows. Within six, more than thirty agents will be delivering measurable business value on behalf of our teams.

This time my optimism is grounded in operational reality. Our IT Director, Michael Normington, recently built and deployed an AI sales agent for competitive analysis which is now used by more than 80% of our sales department. And he built it at home. In three hours. Entirely on his own time. It doesn’t get more fractional than that. Just imagine how much we will achieve with a dedicated team living and breathing AI all day long.

The experimentation phase is over. In 2026, we move into execution.

CIO Corner is the executive lens on what’s next in IT, delivered by Nasuni CIO, Dalan Winbush. With a firsthand perspective from the frontlines of IT leadership, Dalan unpacks what it really takes to modernize infrastructure, harness AI, and lead through complexity. This series tackles the hard questions CIOs face today, such as scalability, resilience, velocity, and value. It’s a candid look at how cloud and AI are reshaping enterprise IT — from someone who’s doing it, not just talking about it.