Spotlight on Andrea Bergamini

I’m a technology and cybersecurity executive with 20+ years leading global teams through complex transformations at GE, Heineken, Cargill, ING and — for the past five years — Orbia, where I built the cybersecurity function from the ground up as a greenfield CISO before stepping into the CIO role in 2025. I lead a team across enterprise IT, cloud, OT, cybersecurity, digital products and eCommerce, with the mission of turning technology into an operating engine for Orbia’s varied businesses.

I’m Italian by origin, Amsterdam-based, a telecom engineer by training, and a lifelong learner currently finishing a fourth master’s degree (an Executive MBA at RSM). Fun fact: outside of work I’m a marathon runner and a serious amateur astrophotographer — the running solves the problems, and staring at galaxies reminds me not to take any of them (or myself) too seriously.

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Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.

Steve Jobs had it right — you can only connect the dots looking backward. Mine don’t form a straight line. I started as a telecom engineer in Turin, did stints at Intel, Accenture and SDG, then spent five formative years at GE across their leadership programs and Corporate Audit Staff, which took me through Europe, the US, and — importantly — India, where I got my first real exposure to cybersecurity through third-party risk work. From there I moved through KPMG, Heineken’s global IT audit team, and then Cargill, where I spent nearly five years building and running their Global Cyber Command Center and eventually took on the CIO role for EMEA business applications. A brief chapter at ING as a divisional CISO followed, and then in 2021 I joined Orbia with a blank sheet of paper: no cybersecurity team, no structure, just a mandate to build one. Over the next four years I picked up global infrastructure, ran its transformation, and in February 2025 was appointed VP and CIO. It’s not the traditional CIO résumé — and that’s exactly the point.
 

What is one of your guiding leadership principles?

Technology shouldn’t support the business — it should be the business. That single idea shapes how I structure teams, hire, invest and prioritize. Manufacturing isn’t “aligned” to the business, it is the business, and I want IT to operate with that same intimacy and accountability. The practical consequence is that I’d rather invest patiently in foundational capabilities — the “brilliant basics” of infrastructure, cybersecurity and core platforms — than chase a highlight reel. Done well, IT becomes invisible in the best possible way: reliable like electricity, quietly making everything else possible.
 

What is the greatest challenge CIOs face today, and how are you addressing it?

The real challenge isn’t AI — it’s doing AI, cybersecurity, cost discipline, technology debt remediation and a genuine business transformation all at the same time, in a world where the ground keeps shifting. Macroeconomic pressure, geopolitics and the sheer pace of technology change mean CIOs are being asked to move faster while the runway gets shorter. I address it by refusing the false choice between short-term and long-term. At Orbia we run a dual-track agenda: protect the foundational investments that take years to pay off (you cannot quick-win your way out of technology debt), while simultaneously delivering business-facing work with clear, measurable ROI. I pair that with relentless clarity on roles and decision rights — ambiguity is a silent tax — and with deliberate investment in resilience, both as an organizational capability and as a leadership trait.
 

What is the key to success for someone just starting out as a CIO?

Three things: First, resist the urge to chase early headlines. The decisions that actually define your tenure are the structural ones you make in the first 90 days — roles, decision rights, where the foundational investments go. They’re unsexy and nobody writes about them, but they’re what makes everything else possible. 

Second, anchor every conversation in business outcomes, not technology. Your stakeholders are more tech-savvy than ever; if you lead with the tool instead of the outcome, you’ll lose the room. 

Third, build your own resilience before you try to build it in your team. This job will test it. A run, a hobby, a telescope pointed somewhere very far away — whatever keeps you grounded, protect it on the calendar like it’s a board meeting. And one bonus: don’t worry if your background looks untraditional. Mine did, and it turns out the path is wider than it used to be.
 

How do you measure success as a leader?

By what’s still standing — and still working — after I leave. Legacy for a CIO isn’t the launch event; it’s whether the organization you shaped keeps delivering without you in the room. Concretely, I look at three things. Do the brilliant basics hum along so reliably that nobody thinks about them? Is the team stronger, more empowered and more capable than when I inherited it, with the next generation of leaders visibly ready to step up? And is technology genuinely moving the business — measured in outcomes the CEO and the board care about, not in tools deployed or slides presented? If I can answer yes to those, the rest tends to take care of itself. On a more personal note: my team has historically described me as high-pace and results-oriented, which I take as a compliment with a warning label attached. Over the last couple of years I’ve been deliberately working on the people-oriented dimension — because in the end, the team is the only thing that actually scales.
 

What is the value of being a member of Gartner C-level Communities?

Being a CIO can be a surprisingly lonely job — you’re often the only person in the room with your particular mix of problems. The Gartner community gives me a trusted circle of peers who’ve either already solved what I’m wrestling with, or are wrestling with it at the same time. The value isn’t the big research reports (useful as they are); it’s the candid, off-the-record conversations where people tell you what actually worked, what didn’t, and what they’d never try again. In a role where the pace of change outstrips any single leader’s experience, having that kind of collective intelligence on speed dial is genuinely hard to replicate elsewhere.
 

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