Why So Many AI Pilots Fail

In this episode of The New Automation Mindset, Markus Zirn speaks with Siroui Mushegian, CIO of Barracuda, about how to scale GenAI across your enterprise without losing control or clarity. Siroui discusses Barracuda’s agent-led transformation efforts, from a customer support bot nearing production, to AI-assisted onboarding tools in HR, to internal frameworks for guiding responsible AI experimentation. The two also address why AI pilots often fail, how to support hesitant departments like finance and legal, and what it means to think with a true “scale mindset.”

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Guest Bio

Siroui Mushegian, CIO, Barracuda

Siroui Mushegian is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Barracuda. Siroui joined Barracuda most recently from BlackLine, where she was responsible for all aspects of BlackLine’s internal corporate IT. 

Before BlackLine, she held executive IT leadership roles at PBS’s WNET New York Public Media, the NBA, Ralph Lauren, and Time, Inc. Bringing more than 20 years of executive and IT leadership experience, 

Siroui has successfully built strong operational environments that eliminate technology silos, elevated the maturity and impact of technology within her enterprises and delivered measurable and scalable business outcomes.

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Guest Quote

"Every day I ask myself: will this scale? Am I adding snowflakes or standardizing? With GenAI, we have a real chance to democratize scale. But scale isn’t just technical, it’s cultural. We need to make it easy for people to participate in transformation, not gatekeep it behind specialized roles or departments. GenAI gives us the platform to do that if we’re intentional about how we use it." – Siroui Mushegian

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Time Stamps  

00:00 Episode Start

03:20 How Gen AI transformation compares to previous technological evolutions

08:00 Enabling AI initiatives across the business

12:40 Increasing AI confidence within risk-averse functions

20:25 Making sense of the MIT study

26:05 Broader implications of democritized Gen AI access

29:55 The future of process automation with AI Agents

36:30 The scale mindset

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Episode Key Takeaways

• GenAI is an enterprise transformation, not an IT project: Unlike past tech waves, GenAI is driven from the top and embraced across every function from HR and legal to customer support. This shift requires IT to act as a partner and enabler, not just a solution provider.
• Governance should actually enable speed: AI pilots often fail due to lack of alignment, tooling chaos, or shadow projects that miss the mark. A clear framework for experimentation and governance helps avoid rework while accelerating safe, scalable deployment.
• A scale mindset is foundational to AI success: Scaling AI isn’t just about technology, it’s about designing solutions that avoid single points of failure and can be adopted company-wide. GenAI provides a rare opportunity to democratize innovation, but only if systems and processes are built with growth in mind.

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