Our CIO, Brian McGeough, is on a tour of speaking engagements to share with and learn from peers about how technology is evolving, how companies are adapting to AI, and the ingredients needed to build a successful and innovative company today.
The events offer a space for a candid, peer-to-peer reality check on what’s working, what’s not, and what’s about to change the game.
Across a run of conversations with other technology leaders from the CIO Exchange to AI-focused forums in Dublin, Brian’s answers circled back to a few key ideas: speed matters, data quality does too, and “responsible AI” may be in the headlines, but it’s really good engineering practice with a new coat of paint!
Here’s what he shared across themes of AI, innovation, events, and culture, and the simple (occasionally blunt) lessons he thinks matter most right now for Creditsafe and other companies offering software solutions.
1) The Value of Peer-To-Peer Events
Brian has always been deliberate about the events he attends, and that discipline goes back to the very start of his career.
“Speaking of events, it’s something I’ve always tried to do all throughout my career. Even going back to my earliest days with Intel, I used to participate in what they called the IT@Intel programme. It was really a sales and marketing tool for Intel itself, but for me, it gave me the opportunity to speak very candidly — because I wasn’t selling anything.”
That absence of an agenda, he says, is what changes the quality of the conversation.
“I was just explaining how a large organisation like Intel — and now, in today’s environment, how an enterprise like Creditsafe — struggles with technology. It’s always a much better situation to be in when you can talk to a peer group and just share practice: “This is how I do it. How do you do it? What challenges have you experienced?”.
“In most cases, you gain a lot more credibility because you’re not there trying to sell anything. You’re just there as another peer who has had experience in an area somebody’s interested in.”
For Brian, Peer-To-Peer offers the best experience:
“Be very choosy. Go to events that are not sponsored by X supplier. When it’s truly peer-to-peer dialogue, you’ll get the most value from it.”
2) Any Good AI Is Founded On Great Data
Those peer conversations, he says, offer a place for validating and stress-testing our thinking and plans for new tech, and how they get challenged when they collide with reality.
“A lot of times you go in with a preconceived idea of where you’re taking things. One of the most recent discussions was around responsible AI, and there was a lot of debate about how cautious we need to be when we scale.”
What surprised him was where the debate consistently went:
“The discussion quickly got to: it’s not really about the tools, or the capabilities and features. It’s really about the data.”
“Everybody says data is important — garbage in, garbage out — but you cannot go and automate and build agents to consume data that’s not of good quality. That might seem obvious, but when you start drilling into real use cases, it becomes very real very quickly.”
Hearing others talk openly about their mistakes makes the path clearer.
“When others are speaking about very similar challenges and how they’ve overcome them, it makes the whole journey more understandable.”
“AI a year or two ago was all about discovery — ‘look at all these cool things we can do’. Now it’s about figuring out how we do those cool things without letting ourselves down at the back end.”
3) What CIOs Must Get Right In 2026
Ahead of the CIO Exchange, Brian took part in an interview on what CIOs must get right before 2026, and Brian’s message is to be enthusiastic about the new possibilities tech offers, but temper it with a focus on the actual business impact it has.
“A CIO has to be much more in tune with the business demand in terms of where they’re trying to gain efficiencies. “Businesses are much more squeezed. They’re trying to get more with less.”
“You have to go into the business and help people understand the specific tasks they do day to day that don’t really need a person doing them.”
For Creditsafe, this is something that affects our pace both technically and commercially:
“We want to increase the velocity at which technology can deliver capabilities to our products and services. By incorporating AI tooling into how we build, I expect productivity gains of somewhere between 10, 15, 20 percent over the next 12 to 18 months.”
Brian refers to one of Cato’s favourite quotes to underscore the importance of this focus:
“There’s only two companies in the world today — the fast and the dead. We have to be agile, and we have to be fast.”
4) On AI Strategy: Start Inside Before You Go Outside
Reflecting on some AI-focused events, Brian’s keeps a deliberately consistent message:
“From a Creditsafe perspective, we’ve really prioritised our focus on internal efficiencies and productivity gains…We’ve been somewhat hesitant about putting AI in front of customers as an entry point.”
“You’ll see competitors putting AI bots in front of their websites, but it’s really just window dressing. There’s no real substance behind it. You can give the same response through a web page.”
That doesn’t mean customer AI is off the table, however!
“It’s not ‘no’. It’s ‘not yet’. And certainly not lazily!”
5) And Make Sure AI Is Truly Valuable for Customers!
Brian is clear that AI should enhance and not replace the stuff that already works.
“AI will always be complementary to our products and services. It should enrich what customers are already doing.”
The most obvious starting point is support:
“How do we make customers get information faster? Things like managing an integration to our Connect API. Today, they might trawl documents or wait for a call back.”
“It’s much easier to have that information available through an AI bot that can answer 80 or 90 percent of questions straight away.”
But accountability remains key:
“No matter what happens, if the bot can’t give the answer, there’s always a human at the other end.”
Providing insights, meanwhile, needs more caution:
“We need to be very careful we’re not doing anything to jeopardise compliance.”
6) Innovation Lives Everywhere
Brian has a refreshing angle on what innovation is and where you find it:
“Innovation lives everywhere. It has to be top-down and bottom-up. If you create a group that ‘does innovation’, you’ve already lost.”
That mindset underpins initiatives at Creditsafe like Innovation Day:
“People come with ideas to make anything better — a process, a capability, a product — and we turn the best of those ideas into something tangible.”
Operational innovation across teams also excites him:
“In TechOps, we’re exploring how AI agents can interrogate and triage major incidents before they even happen.”
The impact is cognitive as much as it is productive and technical.
“It removes the mundane work — staring at screens, checking logs — and lets engineers focus on reliability and being proactive.”
7) Innovation, Culture, And Time
Brian believes the culture already exists at Creditsafe:
“There is that culture of innovation and continuous improvement across the business. People are always asking how to make things better.”
He makes a creative link between time and creativity:
“The only way we get time to innovate is by removing the work that isn’t innovative.”
Brian also believes innovation and reducing risks can go hand in hand for a business:
“Take incident management for example, getting to 0 major incidents is ambitious yes, but the aspiration gets us closer by driving key changes and revisiting and refining what is working.”
Put another way, innovation doesn’t just push positive outcomes but can also transform and reduce negative outcomes.
8) Make Everything Better By Being Selfish About AI
When it comes to how we can use AI at an individual level, Brian’s message is personal:
“I’d encourage people to really embrace and understand how AI is going to make them better in their careers.”
And his advice is refreshingly direct and well meaning!
“Be selfish about it. Think about how the next six, nine, twelve months could look if you adopt these tools. How your job gets easier. How the tedious parts shrink.”
“Just embrace the technology that’s ahead of you now — because it’s always going to make your job so much easier.”
Brian’s tech tour is about the conferences and more; they are locus points for the sharing of the wider story that’s unfolding in the tech space right now, where the pace of change AI can deliver needs to be founded on the right data, culture, and compliance practices.
Thanks to Brian for taking the time to share his experiences and thoughts. If you’d like to keep up with him, you can also follow Brian on LinkedIn.
