Jamie Engstrom has a winning personal motto: “We reserve the right to work smarter tomorrow”—shorthand for her IT organization’s commitment to keep learning as AI advances and Caterpillar’s business evolves. As CIO and SVP, Engstrom leads a global IT team of more than 2,200 professionals across 28 countries. Though Caterpillar has used AI in some capacity for three decades, Engstrom now drives the company’s use of AI for things like advanced analytics, automation, and supply chain optimization.
She approaches these key functions in a holistic way. “We think about a digital thread from our demand planning at the enterprise level, and supply planning through to manufacturing and operations, and being able to apply AI to that,” she says. “We’re seeing some really awesome early benefits,” she adds, citing improved quality on the factory floor, better labor planning leading to a reduction in variable labor costs, better management of material shortages, and more.
Engstrom created Caterpillar’s IT AI Center of Excellence and partnered with Accenture and Snowflake to extend that work into manufacturing quality, financial reporting, and supply chain planning. “That is a major part of our strategic initiative and, frankly, where I spend a significant amount of my time,” she says. Under her direction, Caterpillar built an internal data assistant on a Snowflake-based enterprise data foundation, letting employees query trusted company data and get answers in seconds. In June 2026, that work earned Caterpillar Snowflake’s AI Innovator Award for the second consecutive year.
Engstrom has championed an additive, rather than a reductive, approach to leveraging artificial intelligence. AI, she says, is best used for automating mundane tasks and augmenting human intelligence so that workers can do more valuable work. “I think creating the culture [of] safe experimentation, and the education of what the ‘art of the possible’ is, is where employees are going to embrace it more, versus feeling like AI is going to be a competition to their job,” she notes.
Getting workers to buy into the idea of reimagining processes using AI is a question of trust and, Engstrom explains, it’s not just trust in the accuracy and relevance of AI models’ outputs. “Technology adoption is going to accelerate when our employees trust both the processes, the guardrails, the access, and the governance that we have in place—when they have confidence in the underpinning data to be able to know that the output that they’re getting is productive and meaningful for them.”