-By Andrea Calcagno, Co-Founder & CEO, Cloud4Wi

Cloud4Wi is at the forefront of transforming how enterprises leverage physical spaces, offering unified, secure WiFi access and innovative, location-aware experiences for global retailers, shopping centers, and transportation hubs. In an exclusive feature for CIO Bulletin’s “Best Companies to Watch 2025”, Co-Founder and CEO Andrea Calcagno shares how Cloud4Wi is redefining enterprise success by embedding artificial intelligence into every facet of its operations, setting a bold example for businesses worldwide.

The ongoing discourse surrounding artificial intelligence has reached a critical inflection point. For years, we have discussed AI in terms of potential, a technology on the horizon poised to reshape industries. That horizon is now here. We are living through a paradigm shift as profound as the dawn of the internet, a transformation that demands more than mere adoption; it requires a fundamental reinvention of how we operate, innovate, and lead. For C-suite executives, and particularly for Chief Information Officers, the challenge is clear: are we prepared to lead this change, or will we be defined by our failure to act? The future will not belong to companies that simply use AI, but to those that build their entire organizational philosophy around it. This is the dawn of the AI-First enterprise.

This is not a theoretical exercise. The pressure to innovate is immense, and the competitive landscape is being redrawn in real-time by intelligent systems. The risk of obsolescence for those who cling to legacy models is not a distant threat; it is an immediate danger. The modern CIO is no longer just the custodian of technological infrastructure; they are a strategic architect of business value. In this new era, the most critical infrastructure to build is not made of servers and cables, but of data, algorithms, and a culture that knows how to wield them.

At Cloud4Wi, our mission is to empower enterprises to unlock the power of physical locations by enabling them to seamlessly connect people and things with automatic, secure WiFi access and create innovative, location-aware experiences. For our clients—global retailers, expansive shopping centers, and major transportation hubs—this means delivering secure, insightful, and engaging experiences. We came to the stark realization that fulfilling this promise in the age of AI required a profound internal evolution. Providing our customers with smart, autonomous solutions that operate with near-zero execution cost was no longer a feature; it was the core expectation. This understanding was the catalyst for our own AI-First transformation, a journey born from the strategic necessity of leading our market, not just participating in it.

To steer this transformation and ensure it permeated every level of the organization, we established four foundational pillars. These are not merely guidelines; they are the new constitutional principles of our business:

• AI as a Core Expectation in Every Role: The responsibility for AI innovation cannot be siloed within a single department. We have mandated that every employee, regardless of their function, must integrate AI into their thinking and workflows. For a sales executive, this means leveraging AI-driven predictive analytics to identify the most promising leads. For a finance professional, it means using machine learning for more accurate forecasting and anomaly detection. For the marketing team, it means personalizing campaigns and optimizing ad spend based on real-time customer behavior. For the product team, this translates to expedited development cycles and platform enrichment through AI-driven functionalities. We are cultivating a mindset where the first question in any situation is, “How can AI make this better, faster, or more insightful?”
  
  
• AI-Driven Initiatives as the Default: To move from theory to practice, all new projects and initiatives at Cloud4Wi must now have a significant, demonstrable AI component at their core. This structural requirement forces innovation. It eliminates the “business as usual” option and ensures that our developmental momentum is perpetually directed towards a more intelligent future. This creates a powerful innovation flywheel; a successful AI application in marketing inspires a similar approach in customer success, which in turn fuels new ideas for product development.
  
  
• AI-Enhanced Performance and Recognition: To truly embed a new value system, you must align it with your mechanisms for recognition and reward. We are weaving proficiency with AI tools and the successful implementation of AI-driven strategies directly into our performance management framework. We are signaling that an employee’s ability to creatively apply intelligence to solve business problems is as valuable as any traditional KPI. This fosters a culture of empowered experimentation and rewards the curiosity that drives breakthrough innovation.
  
  
• Radical Empowerment through Continuous Learning: You cannot demand transformation without providing the tools for it. Recognizing this, we have made a significant investment in our team’s capabilities by committing to four hours of dedicated AI training and experimentation per week for every single employee. This is protected time for them to explore new tools, take courses, and collaborate on AI-centric projects. We are building collective intelligence, ensuring our workforce is not just prepared for the future, but is actively building it. This requires creating a psychologically safe environment where experimentation is encouraged and failure is treated as a valuable data point on the path to success.

The ultimate objective of this internal revolution is to radically elevate the customer relationship. An AI-First culture translates directly into tangible, external value. It means shifting from reactive to predictive customer support by identifying and resolving issues before the customer is even aware of them. It means moving beyond demographic segmentation to true hyper-personalization, delivering unique experiences based on an individual’s real-time behavior and needs. It means our product roadmap is a living entity, dynamically shaped by AI analysis of usage patterns, ensuring we are always building what our customers truly need.

This journey is not about incremental improvement. It’s about redefining what’s possible. To my fellow leaders, the time for observation is over. The challenge is to look beyond the immediate ROI of cost savings and to grasp the monumental opportunity for value creation. This transformation is a defining moment of leadership. Let us embrace the AI imperative and build the smarter, more agile, and profoundly more human-centric enterprises of tomorrow.