Seaco

Seaco is one of the world’s largest and most reputable container lessors, managing and leasing a diverse fleet of 2.4M+ TEU globally. In 2025, Seaco celebrates its Diamond Jubilee, 60 years of pioneering container innovation and leading change in container leasing, has 23 offices and integrates with 500 depots and ports all over the world. As we are a Data-driven organization, AI provides an exciting opportunity for us to enhance our services, adapt and accelerate digital transformation.

Building an AI-ready enterprise is not for the faint-hearted. It requires immense patience, trust, a skilled and motivated IT team and critical support from C-level peers, the CEO and the Board. To lay the foundations for AI, you must start with the fundamentals; here are five areas of focus:

1. Create a technology strategy and vision, and establish IT policies that align with that.

2. Understand the data you own and how it connects to business value

3. Embracing game-changing technologies in the cloud

4. Harnessing the power of grassroots innovation from the ground up.

5. Balancing innovation with operational resilience

6. Building a growth mindset, moving IT from being transactional to strategic.

7. Know the power of human value.

• Invest in building internal capability and ownership of the data and models

• Only partner with technology organizations that can adapt with you, help accelerate your plans and share the same values

Creating a Strategy and Vision Underpinned by Guardrails

Every organization needs to embrace AI, but to be a responsible, ethical user of AI or build models that are transparent, you must start with foundational AI IT policies. Every industry vertical, business, customer, product and market in which each organization operates could be different. It’s never a one size fits all.

Find the balance that works for you. The policies you create must be built to fit your organization. It’s imperative to get buyin and ownership of these policies before you embark on the journey to transform, or else it will cause conflict. The right IT policies, along with the right controls and broad agreement, will anchor the AI strategy you execute. This, in turn, will help create company guardrails that channel the AI strategy to meet regulatory controls and model adherence.

Understand the Data You Own and How It Connects to Business Value

As a CIO, understanding the data you own is fundamental to unlocking true business value. Data is no longer a by-product of operations. It’s a strategic asset that, when properly harnessed, can drive smarter decisions, improve customer experiences, and, in the age of AI, create a competitive advantage. Great Data that you trust is also the bedrock of AI model quality; organizations must go beyond simply storing data and focus on delivering key business outcomes. This means identifying which datasets are critical, understanding their quality and lineage, and assessing how they inform or influence business processes, customer engagement, and financial performance. Data empowers teams at every level to innovate, respond faster to market needs, and deliver measurable value.

Embracing Game-Changing Technologies

Technology has advanced. The implementation of our Data Lakehouse and moving the entire company to the cloud have arguably been some of our biggest game-changers.

Previously, data fragmentation hindered insights; reports were processed on local machines using traditional office software tools, limiting scale and speed. By centralizing both structured and unstructured data in the cloud, we’ve dramatically expanded our analytical capabilities.

“As a CIO, understanding the data you own is fundamental to unlocking true business value. Data is no longer a by-product of operations. It’s a strategic asset that, when properly harnessed, can drive smarter decisions, improve customer experiences and in the age of AI create a competitive advantage”

We no longer have limits and can now query massive datasets surpassing 600 million rows, running multidimensional queries and visualizing them in seconds; the complex computations are handled in the cloud.

Furthermore, the Data Lakehouse will enable us to deliver a unified golden source of truth and help eliminate data silos, ensure data integrity and democratize access to all data from anywhere on any device all at once across our entire business.

The Power of Grassroots Innovation

Homegrown, barrier-free experimentation that can lead to transformative outcomes for both people and the business. However, it only thrives when teams feel psychologically safe to experiment, fail, pick themselves up and try again.

At Seaco, one of the more recent initiatives we launched in IT is the Dev Hack program, which empowers grassroots innovation from our developers. The sprint teams use sandbox environments with synthetic data to test hypotheses and develop minimum-viable products. This initiative has not only generated impactful solutions but has also become a powerful tool for nurturing talent and innovation within our team and building a growth mindset in IT.

Balancing Innovation and Operational Resilience

In the era of AI and big data, innovation is essential but not at the cost of operational stability. Core system resilience remains our top priority; balancing innovation and stability isn’t always easy, but we strive to maintain a healthy equilibrium.

Building the Growth Mindset; Moving IT from Transactional to Strategic

Traditional organizations often struggle to reposition IT as a strategic function rather than a transactional one. Agile, iterative development is critical for IT to move fast and deliver measurable strategic value.

This cultural shift demands strong leadership and support from executive peers. It also involves having the courage to say “no” when needed, done respectfully and strategically; this can strengthen the IT-business relationship and unlock long-term value.

Know the Power of Human Value: Talent, Culture, and Growth

Beyond technical skills, we prioritize attitude, adaptability, and the value individuals bring to the team. Fostering a strong CIO to cross-company C-level peer relationships is a must.

In conclusion, as the business landscape evolves, so must IT. Adaptability is the CIO’s superpower. As such, the IT systems invested in must be flexible, configurable, and seamlessly integrate with other platforms, especially to meet business needs, data compliance and changing regulatory requirements.

Delivering fast, iterative change develops a culture of critical thinking and a growth mindset, essential traits in navigating modern challenges, especially now in the age of AI.