How Intel IT helped create $1.6B in business value during the pandemic
Intel boosted business value while preserving chip foundry operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s how CIO Archie Deskus executed her transformation.
Intel 
It’s hard to calculate the value of work IT teams have performed, a task made more challenging by a global pandemic that redistributed teams remotely. Chipmaker Intel has taken a stab at this endeavor in announcing that its IT organization generated $1.6 billion of business value in 2020, COVID-19 outbreak notwithstanding.
Intel’s IT department implemented remote assistance technologies and augmented reality (AR) solutions to ensure that the chipmaker’s employees could continue to do their jobs from afar, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) software to support sales efforts, according to CIO Archana “Archie” Deskus, who joined the company in January as the coronavirus began circling the globe.
Such production would garner plaudits for any company, but it has more poignance for Intel, which has stumbled in recent years.
The chipmaker ceded ground in the mobile wafer market to rival ARM and lags behind NVIDIA in the red-hot market for GPU processors powering artificial intelligence systems. Moreover, the cloud and edge computing markets are cannibalizing volumes and margins in the server market, where Intel’s x86 chipsets thrive. Those challenges, along with a missed delivery date for its 7-nanometer chips, have courted activist investors.