Leading Voices: how CIO Sandra Kujundzic’s teams tame AI volatility and drive real value.
leadership,
Leading Voices,
people management,
technology,
AI,
culture,
Published on Thu Apr 02 2026
Updated on Mon Apr 06 2026
3 minute read
AI is accelerating faster than enterprise operating models were designed to handle. In every organization, transformation is underway. Roadmaps are expanding, budgets are shifting, and expectations from boards and customers are rising. But acceleration without structure creates volatility - and customer experience is no exception to the rule. While technology introduces possibility, leadership determines whether that possibility becomes measurable value or a mere disruption.
Navigating this tension is the task of Sandra Kujundzic Draskovic, Chief Information Officer at Transcom. Her career reflects a clear evolution from technical expertise to enterprise-scale discipline. And the turning point that shaped it came much earlier than most would expect.
Beyond technicalities, towards transformation.
For Sandra, STEM expertise was never lacking. She began her career at the frontier of science, helping to build a distributed grid of computers across Europe in collaboration with CERN. It was complex, coordinated, systems-driven work. That’s where she mastered the marriage of total precision with holistic alignment.
But very soon, Sandra realized that she wanted to shape business impact beyond the isolation of research. She transitioned into telecom, working at the heart of technical operations to serve business customers. There, she identified a structural gap. As efficient as the department’s operations seemed, their lack of alignment with CX caused friction. Her team needed technical processes that integrated seamlessly into the customer experience. So she built them.
That instinct was not about innovation. It was about integration. Systems must be designed deliberately or friction multiplies. This same lesson would surface again when she stepped into leadership.
The feedback that shaped her people management.
At the age of 24, Sandra became a manager of ten engineers. Authority can be assigned - and she had earned it much earlier than most. But experience can’t be. It’s no surprise that the moment that reshaped her leadership stemmed not from operational failure, but from feedback.
One of her strongest engineers told her he was leaving because he was not developing enough within the team. That conversation exposed something uncomfortable. She had been leading from expertise. Solving problems. Driving performance. Setting direction. What she had not yet mastered was nurturing growth. Sandra realized that she had been trying to replicate her own approach across the team, assuming that what worked for her would work for everyone. It did not - and that’s when she embraced situational leadership.
Situational leadership requires adjusting your approach based on capability, maturity, and context. It demands awareness of where others are, not where you are. It forces a leader to think beyond personal execution and toward scalable enablement, and the impacts of this lesson went far beyond one team. What she learned with people would later define how she thinks about scaling technology.
Connecting talent development to AI success.
Enterprise AI transformation faces the same trap she encountered at 24. It is tempting to scale what works in one environment across the organization. To assume that a pilot’s success translates universally. To deploy tools before teams are ready to absorb them. But AI does not scale through replication alone. It scales through structured attunement. That is why Sandra anchors technology decisions in value.
Learn from Sandra.
Sandra’s journey reveals a consistent progression. From science, she learned that systems require design. From early leadership feedback, she learned that growth requires adaptation. From AI transformation, she gleaned that innovation requires structure.
Enterprise CX will continue to grow more complex. AI will continue to accelerate. Expectations will continue to rise. The differentiator will not be access to technology. It will be leadership capable of structuring it. Want to discover Sandra Kujundzic Draskovic’s full insight suite in her own words? Watch her in action on the Leading Voices podcast.
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Created at Mon Aug 10 2026
10 min read
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