Every enterprise wants an AI transformation, but few executive teams want to confront the unglamourous data plumbing required to achieve real returns. As Field CTO at Cloudera, Carolyn Duby operates at the intersection of product engineering, customer friction, and market demand.
Her thesis is direct: artificial intelligence only works when underlying data, security frameworks, governance, and organisational culture are fully prepared.
In her view, real enterprise AI transformation depends entirely on underlying digital infrastructure. Platforms must handle operational complexity across multiple public clouds, regulatory jurisdictions, and legacy estates. At its core, enterprise artificial intelligence remains a data management problem.
To find out more, iTNews Asia spoke with Duby on how she helps APAC organisations and her customers navigate the data challenge.
iTNews Asia: What is the one piece of advice you’d offer to people planning an AI transformation journey?
Duby: A successful digital and AI transformation demands breaking silos and fostering collaboration. CISO (security) and CDO (data governance) roles overlap and they must work in concert. Organisational maturity in processes and collaboration predicts AI and digital success. These outcomes hinge on managing the human element.
Mandating AI without trust disengages teams. Leaders should position AI to augment people, enabling them to do more, not to replace them. Empowerment yields real value; alienation does not.
iTNews Asia: From a customer’s perspective, what is the single most impactful change in a unified platform that they will feel in their day-to-day operations?
Duby: The primary benefit day-to-day for customers is reduced friction between setting goals and achieving them. Organisations are aiming to simplify increasingly complex data landscapes, consolidate tooling, and work efficiently using open, interoperable technologies, all while mitigating the risks of vendor lock-in and disruptive migrations.
We address these challenges by delivering digital sovereignty and unified governance across the entire data estate. Operating through a single control plane, organisations can seamlessly deploy, govern, and scale independent data and AI services across public clouds, private data centres, and sovereign infrastructure, accelerating the deployment of AI projects into production.
Ultimately, customers require interoperable systems so their teams can concentrate on core business priorities. This allows them to spend less time managing underlying infrastructure, connecting disparate platforms, or transferring proprietary data across environments.
- Carolyn Duby, Field CTO, Cloudera.
iTNews Asia: When you discuss security with CISOs, what is a specific, recurring concern they bring up?
Duby: A recurring concern is control: who can access sensitive data, where that data goes, and whether those controls remain consistent as organisations adopt AI across increasingly complex environments. With more cross-functional collaboration in modern organisations, that challenge is compounded when data is spread across different tools and locked in proprietary formats, making it difficult for CISOs to get a unified view of security and bring that data together for analytics and AI.
You’d a consistent security and governance layer across environments, within a platform that is secure by design. A platform such as Cloudera Anywhere Cloud means organisations have centralised, zero-trust governance across distributed data estates through a single control plane, while data lineage and observability provides traceability across their data estate.
They can run AI and data workloads across public clouds, sovereign infrastructure, and private data centres without moving or copying sensitive data. The goal is to give enterprises the agility to move faster with AI while maintaining control over their data and meeting their governance and sovereignty requirements.
iTNews Asia You mentioned Zoom meeting summaries as a success internally. Can you describe a more complex, transformational success you’ve seen where a core business process was fundamentally redesigned with AI?
Duby: Cloudera has worked with global humanitarian organisation Mercy Corps to build the Verified Evidence & Research Assistant (VERA), an agentic AI solution designed to transform how humanitarian teams gather information, analyse crises and deliver timely insights to communities in need.
Rather than relying on largely manual secondary research and desk analysis, VERA automates research, brings together information from diverse and disparate sources, and generates localised, crisis-specific analysis for teams operating in complex environments.
In Sudan, this has reduced research and analysis time from five or six days to two or three. This is a prime example of how ROI ultimately comes down to whether the technology helps teams work more efficiently and turn that productivity into tangible business value.
We’re also seeing transformation at an enterprise infrastructure level. ExxonMobil, one of the design partners for Cloudera Anywhere Cloud, has been
exploring how to bring its data engineering, warehousing, streaming, and AI capabilities together across its operations.
During its trials, the time required to deploy four core data and AI services fell from around six hours to approximately 65 minutes. Moving forward, ExxonMobil is looking to use this foundation to shift from batch processing towards real-time streaming, with AI helping identify equipment faults, surface alerts and support root-cause analysis so engineers can focus more of their time on higher-value work.
