For Juniper CIO Sharon Mandell, every tech decision is about risk versus reward

Sharon Mandell is CIO at Juniper Networks, the networking company that HPE agreed to acquire last year for $14 billion. Juniper is working with some of the largest organizations in the world including the top 10 companies on the Forbes 2000 list. Like most CIOs nowadays, she is looking at the promise of GenAI, while maintaining a critical eye, even as she begins implementing GenAI projects where it makes sense across her company.

It’s worth noting that the acquisition cleared some key regulatory hurdles in Europe over the summer, and is now expected to close no later than the beginning of 2025.

Mandell, who has been with Juniper since 2020, judges her technology buying decisions through a risk/reward lens. Whenever possible, she tries to hedge her bets, especially with startups, by not relying on a single vendor or jumping into a new tech without understanding the impact on her organization. She says that companies with a higher appetite for risk could be willing to embrace new technologies more quickly.

“I think different industries have different levels of risk tolerance. Different organizations have different levels of risk tolerance and belief in their people's level of responsibility in using the technology. And so the more risk you're willing to take, probably the more early gain you're getting,” she said.

GenAI begins to take hold

Two years into the generative AI revolution, Mandell says her company is learning how to use the technology more intelligently inside her organization to solve specific problems, and they’re seeing where it makes sense to put it to work, something many organizations are experiencing right now. 

“It's just becoming this capability that is part of your tool bag along with other capabilities where you're thinking about the most important things I have to do, and how does this help me get there in combination with many other technologies,” she said. 

For instance, she has seen AI help complete mundane tasks that people don’t enjoy doing such as her engineering team producing documentation from their notes for each software update. Writing is not their special strength and putting those notes together into a coherent set of instructions has been a tedious and difficult task prior to bringing in generative AI to help. 

“We can now take that content, make it much more presentable, do all the segmentation, and have a human in the loop only reviewing it, rather than creating it from scratch. That is saving us tremendous time,” she said. 

Then there are things she would like to do that maybe previously fell off the list of priorities because of budget and resource limitations – and she thinks that AI could help with some of those. “If this technology helps us push more of those things above the line at a reasonable cost, while taking tedious jobs away, it can free our people to work directly with our customers more,” said Mandell. Improving customer experience can be difficult to measure in hard dollars, but could still be a big piece of the generative AI value proposition that companies are looking at as they incorporate it into the way they work.

Even while she is implementing a variety of generative AI projects across the organization, she laments a lack of tools for measuring the increase in efficiency that every vendor is promising.

“I think the biggest challenge for some of these things is that you have no baselines, and so it's almost like you have to create baselines for some of these things to understand them as part of the PoC before you apply the AI technology," she said. She would like to see vendors provide more tools to help in this regard, so her team doesn’t have to create things to fill the vacuum left by the vendors.

Startups are definitely part of the equation

In Mandell’s view, there are always going to be places where innovative startups can help her company. “So we are always looking at startups because you have to, because the big guys aren't solving every problem,” she said. 

When it comes to startups, Mandell says she assesses that risk/reward equation and what the startup can offer her company that maybe she can’t find somewhere else with a more established vendor, even if it sometimes comes with a higher level of uncertainty.

“You know, where you put these technologies matters, and sometimes you might take a bet because the upside is so big, and you'll take the upside as long as you can get it. And if it goes away, you'll deal with it later, right?"

But she tries to shield the core business operations from the vagaries of dealing with startups by hedging her bets across multiple vendors whenever possible. That way, if the startup gets absorbed by a larger company or runs into problems, she can recover by moving those functions to a similar product that’s already in place. “I try to have mitigations around that risk, which means I have to have other vendors in place to be sure that if a particular startup is not available to me anymore, it doesn't stop the core of my business."

She says mostly it comes down to building relationships with startups and their investors before they get too involved. “We try to do our best to know who we're buying from and who's backing them, and whose reputations are on the line if it goes bad, besides ours,” she says with a laugh. “But you simply can’t ignore the startup community right now because that's who's going to solve many of these problems.”