AI-First Strategy at Scale: Pega's Roadmap with David Vidoni

Token subsidies are fading, AI prices are rising, and suddenly the fun part of experimentation comes with a nasty surprise: runaway spend. We dig into what that shift means for CIOs and IT leaders who still need to ship results, protect budgets, and prove ROI. 

If you have spent time counting tokens or worrying that one enthusiastic pilot will burn through a month’s AI budget, this conversation is for you.

David Vidoni, CIO at Pega, shares why predictable cost matters as much as model capability and how “charging for outcomes” changes the way you govern AI. 

We talk about the practical tension between creativity and cost control, and why leaders should pause and ask whether AI is genuinely the best tool for a given challenge. 

The goal is not to slow innovation down, but to stop wasting energy on spend anxiety and refocus on measurable business value.

We also get concrete on delivery: how Blueprint supports a design-first approach that clarifies what you are building before you build it, reduces costly mistakes, and speeds up time to first release. 

You will hear real internal stats, plus what it takes to deliver secure, compliant, repeatable outcomes rather than variable answers. 

Finally, we explore agentic AI wins in legal and contract work, including significant hours saved and major ticket deflection.

Listen, then subscribe, share with a fellow CIO or product leader, and leave a review with your biggest AI cost or governance challenge.

Transcript

Meet Pega CIO David Vidoni\n

SPEAKER_00 0:01

So I'm David Vidoni. I'm CIO at Pega. I am responsible for all of our enterprise systems hosting, and I'm leading up the AI first strategy internally for

Infinity Studio And Token Stress\n

SPEAKER_00 0:13

the company. There are a lot of announcements today that get me excited as CIO. One of them being the Infinity Studio that will allow people to carry through that blueprint experience into the entire development cycle. The other thing that excites me is not having to worry about counting tokens. I cannot tell you how much time I've spent in the past few months making sure that we do not spend our entire AI budget in a month because somebody got excited and was playing around and just kept spending and spending.

Subsidised Tokens End And Prices Rise\n

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Tokenomics is all about experimenting, it's about trying to develop things. And really, um the era of subsidized tokens is ending. So for for

Predictable Costs Through Outcome Pricing\n

SPEAKER_00 1:04

many months, different companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, have made it really easy for people to get used to using these products. And once they get used to it, what we're seeing is you know they're starting to ease off on the subsidies for these. And we're getting you know price increases, which is leading to sticker shock. So the the cost benefits of using AI is really changing. And I think all leaders need to step back and really think about whether it's worthwhile using AI for a particular challenge or if it's better to be solved a different way. Pega made a special announcement today around predictability of cost. And that is really important for all IT leaders that have to manage to budgets, that have to deliver value. You want to be putting your energy into making sure that the things that you're building are things that will produce a return. You don't want to be spending your energy worrying about whether that

Blueprint Prevents Costly Build Mistakes\n

SPEAKER_00 2:10

creativity is going to be blowing out your budgets. You should be putting that energy towards positive things, towards transformations. And so the announcement today, I think, will give a lot of people some comfort that they can explore and innovate in a way that's not going to break the bank. Unlike other companies, PEGA is going to charge for outcomes and not for usage. And at the end of the day, that's what matters is whether you're producing an outcome that will lead to ROI and value. Pega is eating their own dog food or drinking their own champagne. And we are living proof of that we are customer zero in using and leveraging and experiencing the value of all of these products. If I was advising other CIOs, which I do do, they should be leveraging Blueprint. Blueprint provides a roadmap for bringing ideas to life and doing that in a structured way, that you're not cutting corners, you know exactly what is being built, and you have a way to do that over and over again. So it's not just focused on delivering the first thing quickly, it's focused on delivering something that's sustainable and can continue to deliver value. Blueprint is unique in the fashion that you you do design what you're building before it's being built, unlike doing something strictly with AI, where you don't know what will be built until it is built. So you avoid a lot of the costly mistakes. You know exactly what is being built, and if you don't like it, you can make a change either with the assistance of AI or you can actually go in manually and make that change yourself, which it's nice to have that flexibility.

Real Results Faster Releases And Easier Change\n

SPEAKER_00 4:00

We've had some amazing stats internally. Just building new applications with Blueprint, we've seen over a 50% reduction in the amount of time it takes to build that first release. So go from four or five months to under three months, and uh subsequent changes become much easier as well. Companies should be excited about the collection of announcements today because it allows you to experience value with AI the right way throughout the entire journey, the entire life cycle of the application, from ideation to build to deploy, and there's a predictable path to get there, so you're not having to figure things out along

Secure Compliant And Repeatable Outcomes\n

SPEAKER_00 4:43

the way. We've done a lot of work to make sure that whatever applications you're building, they're secure. They adhere to compliance, and most importantly, they're giving you predictable outcomes. So you can count on getting the exact same outcomes every time you're running it. And for businesses, they need that. You cannot have variability where it just arbitrarily picks one way or the other depending on when you ran it.

Agentic AI Wins Contracts And Ticket Deflection\n

SPEAKER_00 5:10

In our go-to-market functions, our legal, and and there's a lot of time that is spent analyzing contracts, understanding what was sold, what opportunities are available for future sales. Those are all being assisted with agents today, so everything is at your fingertips when you want to know if for any any customer at any time you could just ask a question, and it will analyze that based on information in the system to get you that answer right away. So, stats that we're seeing out of implementing Agentic AI, we've saved 180 hours of contract analysis per year. We have deflected over 70% of our internal tickets as well as our community tickets coming on. So that is freeing up my team's time that they can take on uh additional work without expanding their teams. For people that were not here today, it's

Watch Keynotes Try Blueprint Free

SPEAKER_00 6:08

unfortunate. Um, so the message that I would ask you to take away is one, watch the keynotes, two, get into blueprint, experiment, create an application, see how easy it is to build workflows, to experience the UI through different channels, and and really um agentically build build it up much more quickly than you could through traditional means and much more predictably than you could do through uh fully agentic means. If folks want to find blueprint, they can just go to our website www.pega.com/slash blueprint. It is really easy, uh, no cost, just just jump in and and start creating some value.