Medtech CIOs can connect silos, accelerate AI integration
By Sheryl Jacobson, US Consulting Medtech leader, Deloitte Consulting, LLP
Accelerated digital transformation is expected to have a substantial impact on medtech companies this year, according to respondents surveyed for Deloitte’s 2026 Life Sciences Outlook. As digital transformation and hyper-automation become more important for business processes and margin improvement—and as connected medical devices become more prevalent—the chief information officer (CIO) is likely to play an even more critical role in medtech. These business leaders are often relied upon to connect organizational silos and ensure that innovation remains secure, compliant, and focused on measurable outcomes.
7 questions for Rashmi Kumar, global CIO at Medtronic
Rashmi Kumar began her career as a metallurgist at a multinational steel company in Jharkhand, India. In the early 1990s, she says, the company was one of only a handful in the country that owned a mainframe computer, which was used to automate and digitize certain processes. Early in her career, she was discouraged from working on the floor of a shop where iron was being melted. Instead, she wound up in the company’s research and development (R&D) department, where she learned about computer programming. Among other things, Rashmi was involved in an early computer model that applied an artificial neural network to predict the temperature in steel bands.
I recently had an opportunity to talk with Rashmi about her background—starting in engineering and evolving into broader tech leadership in the medtech sector. We also discussed artificial intelligence and where AI could be taking the sector this year and beyond. Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Sheryl: During your career, you’ve worked in several different industries. How do you think the role of a CIO in medtech is different?
Rashmi: What’s different is the mission. Patient care as guided by the mission—alleviating pain, restoring health, and extending life. This mission is the top priority and guides the work. Medical technology must be innovative, but at the same time it must be safe, compliant, and aligned with clinical needs. The stakes are high because you are dealing with people’s lives. In addition, medical devices and services must comply with strict regulations. As a result, health care tends to be behind many other industries when it comes to digitization. I’ve worked with utilities, banking and finance, and car companies; they all tend to be further ahead than the health care sector in terms of digitization.
Sheryl: Why do you think health care tends to be behind those industries?
Rashmi: Health care might be the only industry that still uses fax machines, right? Health care is a complicated ecosystem. Technology should be innovative, but at the same time, it should be compliant and aligned with clinical needs. In other industries, everything may be digital, from risk-management to compliance to transactions. In financial services, for example, standards were created to make inter-banking transactions possible.i But due to the fragmentation of the health care ecosystem, it can be challenging to come together with standardized digital interfaces that allow for harmonization.
Sheryl: In your view, what are the core responsibilities of a medtech CIO? How have you seen the role change over the past couple of years?
Rashmi: The CIO’s job is to be a business leader and drive business outcomes. What we are creating should remove friction from the customer's experience. The CIO should think differently than in the past. We should help our business leaders think about the end-to-end value chain. The CIO is responsible for connecting the dots across business units and processes within the company. By design, many of those business units were developed in silos. The CIOs can be well positioned to connect the dots if their IT team understands how to connect businesses across an enterprise.
Sheryl: What sort of an impact do you see AI having on medtech companies and their business processes?
Rashmi: It feels a bit like the early 1990s when we moved from mainframe systems to a distributed system. With AI, we are creating islands of information. If our core systems are fragmented, we might have 20 systems generating data. If these systems aren’t talking to each other, we will never have unified data to feed AI so that it can be used most effectively. From a business perspective, this means there should be top-down, end-to-end thinking. At the same time, platforms and systems should be unified to create what I call a “business-engagement data layer” that can feed AI [to drive efficiencies and the true value potential].
Sheryl: What do you see as the biggest challenges when incorporating AI into products and services?
Rashmi: When we look at AI to automate capabilities or enable a more frictionless experience for customers, we also should think about how those processes were originally designed and then determine how to redesign them using AI. Digitalization on the front end is not likely to deliver value for the customer if the business processes behind the scenes are not harmonized with the business outcome.
Sheryl: Our 2026 Outlook survey found that half of medtech executives expect AI and accelerated digital transformation to have a substantial impact on their organizations this year. Does that align with what you’re seeing?
Rashmi: AI has been embedded into medtech products, and some companies are looking at ways it can be used to make product development better, faster, and more efficient. But companies are also incorporating AI into operational areas like supply chain, finance, and HR (see Can agentic AI improve workflows and margins in medtech?). CIOs should consider how the technology can be used to drive gradual revenue growth, run more efficient clinical trials, and improve compliance.
Sheryl? Do you think it is better to hire talent with AI experience, or train existing IT staff?
Rashmi: We have taken a dual approach. First, we look at how we can train our existing employees in AI. Hiring a bunch of people with AI experience—which we have done—is most likely not going to be enough. We also want to and need to recharge our existing teams to think in terms of how AI could improve business processes. Leadership teams need to constantly drive the adoption of AI, and employees need to have foundational capabilities to move into hyper-automation for end-to-end business processes. We have used consistent messaging across the leadership teams [to emphasize this necessity] as part of our digital transformation strategy.
CIOs can help connect silos, scale value in medtech
As AI becomes more integrated in the medtech sector—from R&D to supply chain, finance, and commercial—value could depend less on isolated pilots and more on unified data, connected platforms, and redesigned end-to-end processes. That shift will likely make the CIO’s role increasingly critical. As a business leader, the CIO should be able to connect silos, build the enterprise foundation for hyper-automation, and ensure innovation stays safe, compliant, and outcome-driven. Our 2026 Life Sciences Outlook survey found that the medtech companies furthest along the AI maturity continuum had the greatest level of optimism about the economy, the industry, and their organization’s financial performance.
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The executive’s participation in this article is solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject and the views expressed by them are solely their own. This article should not be deemed or construed to be for the purpose of soliciting business for any of the companies mentioned, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse the services or products provided by these companies.
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