Lexmark CTO: Boards Demand Measurable AI ROI, Not Just R&D

The boardroom's demand for AI ROI is forcing a strategic shift, moving evaluation from technical possibilities to measurable business outcomes like cost reduction and revenue growth. Boards are now looking for AI initiatives to be presented with clear financial metrics and credible risk assessments, similar to any other major capital investment. This requires CTOs to quantify non-financial benefits, such as regulatory resilience, into financial terms by modeling likely cost-avoidance scenarios. This shift elevates the CTO's role, requiring a strong partnership with the founder or CEO built on mutual trust and clearly defined responsibilities. The founder typically drives the vision and fundraising, while the CTO handles technology strategy, product architecture, and scaling the engineering team. As a company grows, this dynamic evolves, often requiring both leaders to adapt their roles and responsibilities. Agentic AI systems are at the forefront of this ROI-focused conversation, moving beyond simple automation to autonomously execute complex, multi-step workflows across different enterprise systems. These AI agents can plan, act, and adapt to changing conditions, which is particularly valuable for streamlining processes in IT, HR, and finance. Gartner predicts that by 2028, a third of enterprise software applications will incorporate agentic AI. In the adtech space, the phase-out of third-party cookies is forcing a major strategic pivot toward privacy-preserving technologies like Google's Privacy Sandbox. This initiative offers tools like the Topics API for interest-based advertising and an Attribution Reporting API to measure campaign performance without tracking individual users across different apps. Advertisers are now prioritizing first-party data, contextual targeting, and identity solutions to maintain relevance and measure ROI. To increase efficiency and transparency in programmatic advertising, Supply Path Optimization (SPO) has become a key strategy. SPO focuses on finding the most direct and cost-effective routes to purchase ad inventory, which helps to reduce ad fraud and ensures that ad spending is directed toward high-quality placements. This involves removing unnecessary intermediaries that can drive up costs and obscure the programmatic supply chain. Creative automation is another significant trend, using technology to scale the production of ad assets like images and videos. By using template-based systems and AI-driven customization, marketing teams can generate numerous variations of creative content quickly while maintaining brand consistency. This allows for greater personalization at scale and significantly speeds up content production for fast-paced campaigns. Horizontal SaaS platforms, which offer solutions for common business functions across various industries, continue to be a major force in the B2B software market. Companies like Salesforce and HubSpot exemplify this model by providing widely applicable tools for CRM and marketing. This approach targets a large total addressable market, often with a lower annual contract value but with the potential for profitability through high volume and efficient software delivery. In London, police are investigating a series of fires in structures at a homeless camp in the town. In other local news, an inquest has been ordered into the fatal police shooting of a tennis pro.