Dive Brief:
- Mondelēz International CTO and CISO Kostas Georgakopoulos will depart Thursday after more than four years with the food giant, the company said in an email to CIO Dive.
- Chris Hesse, VP of global platform engineering operations and integrations, will lead the CTO organization in an interim capacity, the company said. Hesse joined Mondelēz two years ago after more than 16 years at Procter & Gamble. Benjamin Brophy, who joined the company two months ago from consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser, will assume the CISO lead role, also in an interim capacity.
- Georgakopoulos confirmed the departure in a Friday email to CIO Dive, and said he is leaving to lead the CISO organization for a large global pharmaceutical company.
Dive Insight:
The leadership shift at Mondelēz comes amid a multiyear, $1.2 billion effort to revamp its ERP system and supply chain. Georgakopoulos helped the company lay the groundwork for the transformation effort, which included data center exits and workload migrations.
“When I came to the company four years ago … we had lost the ability to control, manage and enable our strategy and vision,” Georgakopoulos told CIO Dive earlier this year. “We’ve changed that paradigm. We are leading the transformation.”
In addition to the ongoing ERP upgrades, the company infused AI into its advertising and consumer processes.
“We’re also leveraging new technologies, including AI, to rapidly develop and customize new creative while reducing the development cost,” CEO and Chair Dirk Van de Put said in February during an investor conference.
The company has also deployed AI to fuel software development, turning to generative AI coding assistant Amazon Q. Adopting the tool helped accelerate development times and provided a learning resource for new hires, the company told CIO Dive previously.
In April, Mondelēz reported $9.3 billion in net revenue during Q1 2025, a year over year increase of 0.2%, for the period ending March 31.
