Dive Brief:
- Delta CIO Rahul Samant will step down from his role with the company, concluding 10 years of service, according to a Tuesday statement. His retirement is effective March 1.
- With Samant’s departure, Amala Duggirala will join the company as its chief digital and technology officer. Duggirala will start Jan. 12 and report to Delta CEO Ed Bastian. Previously, she served as EVP and CIO at financial services company USAA for four years.
- “Rahul focused on delivering secure and reliable IT services across the company, fostering a culture of innovation, and developing the next generation of technology leaders,” Bastian said in the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Samant has led Delta through significant technology transformation over the last decade, which included shepherding the 100-year-old company’s push to the cloud and managing disruptions including the CrowdStrike outage that grounded thousands of flights.
During his tenure, Samant launched a broad cloud migration plan, tapping IBM in 2021 to help modernize and move applications to the public cloud and naming AWS as its preferred cloud partner in 2022. In both cases, the company underscored the relationship between tech modernization and customer experience.
“We’re not just transforming our IT backbone — we’re rallying our entire organization to use leading technology to improve our customers’ travel experience in meaningful ways,” Samant said, referring to its multiyear AWS partnership in 2022.
The relationship between technology and customer experience still seems to be top of mind at Delta with Duggirala’s dual technology-digital role. “Unifying our commercial digital products with our enterprise technology foundation will help us accelerate our journey as a technology-driven consumer brand,” Bastian said in the release. SVP and Chief Digital Officer Eric Phillips will report to Duggirala.
The double title also signals a potential organizational trend of technology departments consolidating across the business, and CEOs seeking a transformational executive to lead, according to Martha Heller, CEO at Heller Search.
“What Delta is doing is they are replacing a real CIO with another real CIO who knows IT and cloud and cyber and all the real stuff,” Heller said. “But they're expanding their influence into data, AI, transformation.”
CIOs are primed for such roles, Heller said, which she described as being more akin to a chief technology transformation officer. They bring deep technology and leadership experience still critical to the enterprise but begin to oversee data and digital operations as companies navigate AI’s influence, Heller added.
