Piero Azzalini
Group CIO
Fincantieri
June 2025
For Piero Azzalini, Governing Body Member of the Italy CIO Community, the journey to becoming a CIO was marked by a swift ascent through the ranks of the IT industry. After graduating in electronic engineering in 1985, he began his career at IBM, and by 1995, he had assumed his first CIO role. Now, he has spent thirty years in the role, which as he says, is “quite a long tenure as a CIO.”
Piero spent much of that time in the insurance industry, including a 14-year tenure at Allianz. During his time there, he held various roles, including CEO of the technology company of Allianz in Italy, while maintaining his position as the Italian CIO. In 2017, Piero made a career shift by joining Fincantieri, a manufacturing company, where he is currently Group CIO.
Despite working in multiple industries, Piero notes, “One of the lessons that I have learned after 10 years in banks, 20 years at insurance companies, and now 8 years in manufacturing, is that the basics of the CIO role are almost the same.”
The CIO role is more and more central to the business strategy, and this is quite exciting.”
Throughout his career, Piero has embraced the challenges and rewards of the CIO role. He shares that “All of my career, I was basically doing the CIO role – with all the good and the bad that it carries.” Now, he finds the role particularly exciting due to the focus on innovation, digitalization, and emerging technologies, like AI and robotics.
Top Priorities as a CIO
In fact, Piero indicates that his “priority number one” for this year is artificial intelligence. At Fincantieri, they are working on a complex digital transformation, and he says, “Today, digital transformation means having an agenda for AI, because AI is so disruptive that you cannot keep it out of a digital transformation.” He adds that AI brings a lot of opportunities, but also challenges, and thinks it’s necessary to have “a balanced approach to AI – within your general innovation strategy.”
Piero also shares that innovation is at the center of their master plan at Fincantieri and that they recently completed a challenging journey to the cloud. In addition, they are using artificial intelligence for engineering and are working with physical AI and robotics in their shipyards.
At the upcoming Italy CIO Community Executive Summit, Piero will speak about the intersection of AI and robotics, sharing with his peers about a pioneering application for it at Fincantieri. He explains, “Fincantieri shipyards are very far from a typical manufacturing environment, like an automotive assembly line. The shipyard is reconfiguring every day, and the environment is quite harsh. In order to have success, the kind of robots that you use are very different.” He adds that they are “completely autonomous and require a lot of artificial intelligence.”
He looks forward to discussing it at the summit because they have been able to put some applications of this specialized branch of AI and robotics into production at Fincantieri. He says, “We have a drone that is measuring the quality of the welding. We have a welding robot. We also have a rover that is preparing material at night for the people that work in the morning – in a completely autonomous way. It's a very interesting field.” He adds that “There are not a lot of real experiences in this because you need unique challenges in order to apply it.”
Innovating at a 230-Year Old Manufacturing Company
Prior to their innovative AI projects, Piero and the team at Fincantieri transformed their engineering system into 3D and 2D. This provided the capability for engineers to work in a completely virtual environment to create a digital twin of their ships. Piero adds that even though Fincantieri is a traditional company with a 230-year history, “We are doing a lot of digital transformation because the ship is, per itself, probably the most complex object in the world.”
He notes that for each ship, there is five times the iron that is in the Eiffel Tower, and more than 500,000 principal components. “You can imagine how complex it is to engineer a 400-meter ship with half a million pieces… So to have digital twins, to have very sophisticated engineering, is very important.”
Piero’s key principles for driving innovation at Fincantieri are twofold. He shares that they prefer to do as many tasks as possible internally. They started an internal digital lab, which is still in the early stages, and they are hiring people from universities and other companies for it.
At the same time, they like open innovation. As Piero explains, “We are willing to retain know-how, but still be open in innovation. We have created an innovation radar that is a methodology for evaluating all the innovation on the market.” He adds that “it’s a little bit opposite to have these two principles. We have a stronger focus on the internal capability, but combine that with collaboration with startups and others.”
Innovation is my favorite part of the role, but we cannot forget that a CIO is much more than a Chief Innovation Officer.”
Keys to Success for New CIOs
With his extensive experience in the role, Piero shares three keys to success for CIOs.
- Keeping calm in challenging situations. “First of all, you need to be stress resistant because as a CIO you face some difficult situations,” Piero says. “Things will go down, there are things you cannot deliver – but if you are not able to keep cool, there is a risk of creating a bigger mess.”
- Maintaining strong relationships with stakeholders. The other important characteristic for CIOs is “the capability to have an easy liaison with others – because you are serving everyone in the company,” he shares. “It’s important that the business understands that you are there to help make them successful.”
- Managing people effectively. “A lot of people think that the CIO has a very technical job,” he explains. “In reality, it's more about the management of people. Technology is important, but the key to success in my experience is to have a good team.”
Piero sums up the CIO role this way: “A CIO has to ensure that production runs smoothly, that costs are kept under control, that the quality of the service is good, and that the customer satisfaction of the colleagues is high. It's a real 360-degree job.”
To participate in Piero’s keynote, Transform IT with Robotics to Future-proof Your Business, at the upcoming Italy CIO Community Executive Summit, sign into the app to register. If you are new to Gartner C-level Communities, apply to join your local CIO community to connect with peers on top priorities, like AI and innovation.
Special thanks to Piero Azzalini and Fincantieri.
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