Each year, Informatica’s CDO Awards highlight the state of the art in data and — increasingly — AI management leadership. Now in its fourth year, the awards continue to recognize Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and Chief Data & Analytics Officers (CDAOs) driving enterprise transformation, operationalizing AI responsibly and embedding trust into every decision.

The need for strong leaders has never been greater. According to our 2025 CDO Insights survey, about 84% of data leaders say AI adoption is now a board-level priority, yet fewer than half feel fully prepared to scale responsibly. And this is largely due to a lack of confidence in the underlying data.

Having data spread out in many different places is a top barrier to getting ready for AI, while demand for AI governance, literacy and explainability continues to surge. These findings underscore the importance of the CDO Awards as a spotlight on those meeting the moment.

Four categories, four dimensions of leadership

The CDO role is as diverse as the organizations it serves. Some focus on building foundational data strategies that enable AI. Others push boundaries of applied innovation. Many champion data and AI literacy and improve culture, enabling a shared language and purpose across the enterprise. While others concentrate on higher performance and scale to keep pace with their exponential growth.

To reflect this breadth, the CDO Awards recognize nominees across four categories. Each represents a distinct impact of leadership, while together they form a complete picture of what it takes to succeed in today’s data-driven economy.

Data Strategy Gurus

Nominees in this category demonstrate mastery in building the trusted foundations that make analytics, AI, customer experience and other value-generating programs possible. Highlights of this year’s nominees include:

• Reducing data-related incidents by roughly one-third and cutting decision-making turnaround times nearly in half through operationalized governance and real-time analytics
• Migrating a majority of core workloads to secure cloud infrastructure in under a year
• Achieving faster impact analysis and significant productivity gains through automation
• Unifying master data across over a dozen systems to support hundreds of users and enhancing compliance

These leaders show that strategy is a living framework that evolves with the business and sets the stage for AI adoption at scale.

AI Visionaries

Nominees in this category push boundaries, moving from AI experimentation and pilot programs to scaling out enterprise-wide deployments. Their work includes:

• Increasing operational efficiency by nearly 70% and generating tens of millions in incremental revenue through AI-driven pricing and engagement
• Reducing infrastructure costs by about 40% via consolidation of multiple core systems into a unified architecture
• Accelerating model deployment timelines and reducing time-to-train by nearly half through governed data pipelines
• Rolling out generative AI platforms to thousands of employees across dozens of countries, generating well over 100,000 prompts while maintaining ethical guardrails

These leaders illustrate how AI vision is no longer about test cases — it’s about embedding intelligence across the fabric of the enterprise.

Literacy luminaries

Nominees here focus on culture, education and empowerment to build confidence. They recognize that without literacy, even the best data platforms and AI models will fail to deliver value. Their initiatives include:

• Training dozens of data stewards and analysts, increasing metadata engagement severalfold within months
• Cataloging tens of thousands of data assets and publishing hundreds of glossary terms to link technical metadata to business KPIs
• Reducing data discovery and lineage validation time from days to under an hour
• Improving enterprise data fluency across actuarial, underwriting and product teams, enabling faster pricing and regulatory reporting

These leaders prove that literacy is not a side initiative — it is the foundation for sustainable AI adoption and resilience.

Performance Optimizers

Nominees in this category ensure that data and AI initiatives scale with the demands of the enterprise. Their work emphasizes efficiency and future-proofing by:

• Unifying dozens of legacy systems and achieving well over 100% ROI in under six months, generating tens of millions in incremental GMV
• Reducing IT maintenance hours by half and improving customer compliance rates by nearly 20%
• Aggregating and standardizing billions of health records to support statewide transparency and policy initiatives
• Cataloging over 100,000 technical assets and implementing nearly 100 classification rules to support real-time data quality and retention

These leaders remind us that performance is not just about speed — it’s about resilience, scalability and readiness for what comes next.

Introducing the 2025 CDO Award Winners

While the above examples illustrate the types of innovation shaping the field, the following leaders stand out as this year’s winners. They represent the best of what it means to lead with vision and impact in the era of data and AI.

• Laure de Montandon, CDO, Volkswagen Group France – Data Strategy Guru
• Rakesh Kalyankar, Head of Data Services, AustralianSuper – Data Strategy Guru
• Jo Ohazo, CDO, Advantage Solutions – Data Strategy Guru
• Alberto Marco, CDO, RGA (Seguros RGA) – AI Visionary
• Andy Ta, CDAO, Synapxe – AI Visionary
• Rakshit Kapoor, CDO, Chubb – Literacy Luminary
• Edgar Nuñez, CDO, Coca-Cola FEMSA (KOF) – Literacy Luminary
• Tul Roteseree, CDO, Bank of Ayudhya Public Limited Company – Literacy Luminary
• Steven Sottana, Chief Data Strategist, California Department of Health Care Access & Information – Performance Optimizer
• Patrick Witasse, CDO, GERFLOR – Performance Optimizer
• David Thomas, CDO, New Zealand Post – Performance Optimizer

Defining the Future of the Intelligent Enterprise

The 2025 winners embody themes emerging across the industry. Our 2025 CDO Insights survey shows that increasingly, CDOs now carry direct revenue accountability, and more than half are measured on AI outcomes in addition to data quality and governance. Trusted data and AI disciplined governance, and a culture of accountability, are no longer optional — they define readiness for AI leadership.

These leaders don’t just experiment with AI — they operationalize it responsibly, with measurable outcomes that set new standards for what’s possible.

For more details on the winners, I invite readers to explore:

• The blog on Informatica.com and
•  Customer Success Stories across a broad range of industries and sizes
• Download the CDO Insights 2025 survey for more details on market trends

About the Author: 

Jim Kruger is Executive Vice President (EVP) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Informatica, where he leads the global marketing organization with the charter to accelerate cloud growth, expand into new markets and industry verticals, and lead the company’s brand momentum.

Kruger has more than 25 years of experience in leading all facets of marketing and driving growth. In his previous role as CMO of Veeam Software, he led all aspects of Marketing and Sales Enablement for the company in the Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Market. Prior to this, he was CMO at Intermedia, offering Unified Communications as a service to businesses. Kruger spent 17 years at Polycom in a variety of roles, from Executive Vice President/CMO to leading product marketing and product management for the Voice division to Vice President/General Manager over a $200M business. Prior to Polycom, he served in several senior marketing roles with GTE (Verizon) wireless and Palm.

Kruger holds an MBA from California State University, East Bay, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.