The IT Circle: Interview with Eric Ceyral, CIO at Groupe Stelliant

In this conversation, Eric traces a career built at the intersection of business and technology, from risk management and insurance brokerage to leading the IT transformation of one of France's most active players in claims expertise. He talks candidly about what keeps CIOs up at night in an era of accelerating change, why understanding the business is more valuable than mastering every technology, and how communication remains the industry's most persistent blind spot. On AI, he is genuinely excited but grounded: the productivity gains are real, the constraints around energy and governance are just as real. And on the future of the CIO role, his message is clear: curiosity and business proximity matter far more than technical omniscience.

What are the biggest challenges facing CIOs and IT departments over the next five to ten years?

For me, the biggest challenges are still fundamentally about digitalisation, but they are being turbocharged by the explosion of AI. We are entering a world where the productivity gains in software and application development are going to be enormous. But the challenge is that we have to invent the way of life that goes with it. We need to be able to bring our teams and our people along on that journey, and there are serious HR implications around that. There are also growing concerns around cybersecurity, privacy and data leakage, and those will only intensify. And then at some point, all of this is going to hit the wall of resource availability. AI is a significant consumer of energy, and the peak of fossil fuel consumption is already behind us. So there are real constraints around optimisation and resource efficiency that the industry cannot ignore forever.

💡"The productivity gains are real and exciting. But we also have to invent the way of life that goes with them, and that includes bringing people along, not just deploying the technology."

As a CIO, what worries you most today? Does the pace of technological change make your job easier or harder?

What makes it genuinely difficult is the compression of time. A few years ago, a major decision would commit you for several years and you could plan around it. Today, I have the feeling that a decision I make now could be obsolete or need revisiting within six months. More and more things are becoming volatile. Managing a DSI budget used to feel like relatively stable ground. Now, prices can move in ways that are very hard to anticipate. In short, uncertainty has gone up significantly, and that is the thing I find most challenging about the role today.

💡"Before, a decision would commit you for years. Now, I feel like any decision could be questioned within months. It's not the technology itself that's scary, it's the acceleration."

How do you manage SAM and IAM challenges within a group like Stelliant?

On IAM, we have ongoing projects to roll out single sign-on across our information system, relying on the most established players in the market. On the asset management side, it's a very live topic for us right now. We have grown significantly as a group in recent years, so we are actively putting tools in place to monitor our full asset estate, cloud infrastructure, physical equipment in our offices, mobile devices, all of it. The goal is to connect everything to our CMDB and move away from scattered spreadsheets and fragmented information. The message is really one of centralisation: consolidating around solutions that reflect best practices and give us a clear, unified view of what we own and what we need to protect.

💡"The goal is centralisation, getting away from scattered spreadsheets and building a unified view of everything we own, from cloud infrastructure to the phone in someone's pocket."

In the insurance world, how important is the IT ecosystem becoming?

Increasingly important, and catching up fast. Insurance has always been a heavy consumer of mathematical models and data. But with a world that is growing more complex, where past experiences no longer reliably predict future behaviour, you need increasingly sophisticated algorithms and technology. Climate change and the emergence of new risks like cyber are forcing the industry to invest in more advanced tools. On top of that, the sector is dematerialising rapidly. You see marketplaces emerging, like Darva, designed to allow data sharing between insurers, experts, brokers and other actors to make exchanges faster, more streamlined and more secure. It is an industry that was historically a bit behind, and it is now catching up at speed.

💡"Insurance was historically a bit behind on technology. Climate change, cyber risk, and the push to dematerialise are forcing the industry to catch up, and fast."

Do you need to be highly technical to be a good CIO?

That's a great question, and honestly I wish I had a cleaner answer. My view is that you need to be deeply curious, and you need to be close to the business. But above all, you need to surround yourself with strong technical people, because no one can master everything anymore. Security, cloud, FinOps, DevOps, data lakes, the breadth is just too wide. What I do think is underrated is understanding the business itself. Paradoxically, that might be the most important skill a CIO can have. You need to understand the operational gestures, the workflows, what actually slows people down. That is where IT can create the most value.

💡"You can't master everything anymore. Surround yourself with great technical people, but never stop trying to understand the business. That, paradoxically, is the most important skill."

What levers do CIOs have to stay aligned with business priorities while delivering real value?

First, the CIO needs to be in the room where decisions are made, at the executive committee level. If you're not there, you're always reacting rather than shaping. Beyond that, there are underused levers like research tax credits, innovation partnerships with universities and engineering schools. And I would strongly advocate for CIO peer groups and think tanks. The biggest risk for a CIO is spending all your time with your nose to the grindstone on operational issues and never lifting your head to see what is coming. Those forums help you do exactly that, stay connected to what's changing before it changes you.

💡"One of the biggest risks for a CIO is never lifting your head from operational problems. Peer groups and think tanks exist for a reason, use them."

Looking back at your career, was becoming a CIO the logical next step?

Yes, I think it was. I started on the business side, I stayed close to the insurance industry, and I built up experience across smaller and larger structures along the way. I also spent time doing CIO auditing and consulting, which was genuinely invaluable. It exposed me to a huge range of good and less good practices, across companies of very different sizes and maturity levels. Every context taught me something. So where I am now feels like a natural synthesis of all of that. The more different contexts you've been exposed to, the better equipped you are to lead a transformation.

💡"The more different contexts you've been exposed to, the better equipped you are. Every organisation I worked in taught me something I couldn't have learned anywhere else."

Are IT challenges specific to each organisation, or do you see recurring patterns?

There are definitely patterns. Technical debt is one of the most universal. If you don't address it, it always explodes in the face of whoever ignored it. Communication is another constant: IT teams often struggle to explain their constraints to people who don't live in that world. It's a bit like the curse of the expert, the more you master a domain, the harder it can be to translate it for others. And there's a deeper tension in IT departments: the people who are best at writing code tend to be introverted and introspective by nature, which makes them brilliant at what they do but not always natural advocates for their own projects internally. Everyone uses technology, so everyone has an opinion on how IT should work. That can be genuinely frustrating, but it also means communication has to be a deliberate, ongoing effort, not an afterthought.

💡"Communication is one of the biggest ongoing challenges in IT. Everyone uses the tools, so everyone has an opinion. Turning that from a source of friction into a source of alignment is one of the CIO's real jobs."