Verizon CIO Shankar Arumugavelu on putting emerging technologies to work

Shankar Arumugavelu is what you might call a Verizon lifer. He was a director at telecom GTE when Bell Atlantic acquired it in 2000 to form Verizon. Today he's SVP and global CIO of Verizon, where he's helping to drive the company's adoption of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning in service of creating competitive advantage and improving customer experience. "As we look at emerging technologies, AI is a big area of focus," Arumugavelu says. "You have disciplines within AI as well, whether it's NLP or computer vision, robotic process automation, cognitive decisioning, etc. We have work going on across every single one of those disciplines to see how we can leverage that to drive a competitive advantage."