After working at big banks including Citigroup and UBS, followed by a stint as information security for consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, Kostas Georgakopoulos got an offer he couldn't refuse from snack maker Mondelez International to run both its IT and cybersecurity operations.

“That was a pretty unique challenge,” says Georgakopoulos, who started at the company in 2021 as CISO and chief technology officer. “Part of the reason I came to Mondelez was the opportunity to do two different roles that have a lot of parallel tracks, but have their own uniqueness in terms of responsibilities.”

One early change he made was to add more cybersecurity expertise to Mondelez, which generated $36 billion in annual revenue for the latest fiscal year 2023 and ranks No. 115 on the Fortune 500. The company now has over 50 full-time cyber specialists, up from about 10 when Georgakopoulos joined, and this team manages all cyber platforms rather than hiring a third party to do that work on its behalf.

As CTO, Georgakopoulos has hired dozens of engineers globally who are proficient with cloud platforms including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google. While it has embraced a multi-cloud approach, the company last month designated AWS as its strategic cloud provider and has already migrated hundreds of workloads there—including hundreds of terabytes of data from finance, marketing and sales, and communications. "Our focus has been to exploit the automation that AWS has," says Georgakopoulos.

For example, when moving a workload to the cloud, his team can add a ticket to ServiceNow that asks AWS to autonomously move a user’s identity, login, access to software, as well as micro-segmentation, a security method to manage employee access to data, applications, and other workloads. It can take less than 20 minutes to set this system up to create these user controls and privileges, and Mondelez says it can add hundreds or even thousands of servers that give workers access to applications or files.

Georgakopoulos says the bigger bet on AWS means lowering costs versus what competitors offered and creating a less complex environment to store data across the company. Working with AWS lets Mondelez “significantly” reduce the number of Microsoft servers it uses, thereby cutting software licensing costs and minimizing operational issues that have become more prevalent and have stung Mondelez and others.

The main one was last year’s global IT outage that impacted millions of Microsoft devices and servers connected to cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike. Mondelez's systems suffered more than five hours of downtime due to the CrowdStrike outage.

Also under Georgakopoulos, Mondelez has tested a number of generative artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot in an effort to increase employee productivity. But he says he's unconvinced about those promised productivity gains and the hype about cost savings.

“It is a bit early when you look at the solutions that are available by the major cloud providers,” says Georgakopoulos. “We have not seen the [return on investment] ROI, at least that’s being marketed or sold by the industry.” 

In the future, he expects his engineering team will be able to offload some mundane tasks to generative AI tools, though he says humans will remain in the loop. Unlike executives at some other companies, he doesn't expect those efficiency gains to translate into fewer employees.

Georgakopoulos also expressed concerns about using AI to create images for functions like marketing, which he said could expose Mondelez to claims of intellectual property infringement. AI creates images that are based on the images used in the underlying model for training, and many model providers fail to get permission to use those images from image owners.

Integrating acquisitions is another focus for Georgakopoulos and his team, as Mondelez has in recent years bought protein bar brand Clif, Greek food maker Chipita, and snack brand Ricolino. Mondelez is also said to be considering a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Hershey, in what would be the company’s second attempt to buy the chocolate maker.

When new brands are brought into the fold, Mondelez focuses on integrating cybersecurity first, like deploying CrowdStrike on all devices from Clif or Chipita. Mondelez does allow individual brands to operate unique software if it feels that those legacy systems have some competitive advantages. But in general, the company wants everyone to use the same tools, to be more cost efficient.

“You have to standardize, you have to automate, and you have to take advantage of what works well for your business,” says Georgakopoulos. “I think we’ve taken a measured approach.”

John Kell

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com