Kimberly Clark has spent 154 years building brands that consumers no longer think of simply as products but as part of everyday life. Ask someone for a tissue, and there is a good chance they will ask for a Kleenex instead. That kind of staying power does not happen by accident, and it is part of what drew Francesco Tinto to become the company's Chief Information and Global Business Services Officer earlier this year.

Tinto arrived after serving as Chief Digital and Information Officer of Advantage Solutions, Global Chief Information Officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance and North American CIO of Kraft Heinz. At Kimberly Clark, a company operating in 175 countries with roughly $16.5 billion in annual revenue, he now oversees both the technology organization and the shared services functions supporting the back office. "It's incredible, the heritage and the resilience of this company," Tinto said, describing an organization that has repeatedly reinvented itself while keeping brands including Huggies, Kleenex, Scott and Kotex relevant across generations.

A Strategy Built on Durable Growth

Two years ago, Kimberly Clark launched its Powering Care strategy, which Tinto noted was among the factors that attracted him to the company. The strategy rests on three pillars: out innovating, out marketing and out activating. Together, they describe a company seeking to bring new products to market faster, deepen its relationships with consumers and execute with greater speed across channels and markets.

"We never think in terms of only reducing cost or only innovation," Tinto emphasized. "It's really this concept of durable, sustainable growth, which allows us to think in terms of innovation and in terms of efficiency."

That balance is particularly important for a company whose products are ubiquitous but operate in intensely competitive categories. Technology therefore has a dual mandate: help Kimberly Clark operate more efficiently while simultaneously creating the capabilities that can fuel its next generation of growth.

Bringing Technology and Global Business Services Together

Tinto's dual mandate is relatively new. When he joined Kimberly Clark, responsibility for both technology and Global Business Services was brought under his leadership. While the organizations remain roughly equal in headcount, they increasingly operate against a common roadmap, with technical process owners in IT partnering with global process owners in GBS.

"The key power of GBS is really moving to the capability of bringing services that are highly automatized, driven by AI," Tinto explained.

He sees an opportunity to evolve from processes dependent on manual work toward an increasingly digital workforce, with technology and AI embedded throughout operations. Combining IT and GBS under a single leader also creates an opportunity to rethink processes rather than simply automate existing ones.

Putting Data to Work in the Supply Chain

Much of that transformation depends on the data foundation Kimberly Clark has spent years building, including a data lake that harmonizes information from across the enterprise. Tinto highlighted supply chain applications as among the clearest examples of that investment paying dividends, with AI now being applied to areas ranging from raw material sourcing to real time manufacturing analytics.

Predictive maintenance offers one example. Rather than waiting for manufacturing equipment to fail, Kimberly Clark can use AI to recognize signals indicating that maintenance may soon be necessary. That allows maintenance to be scheduled during planned windows, reducing unplanned downtime and increasing manufacturing efficiency. More broadly, it demonstrates how the combination of high quality data and AI can move the organization from reacting to problems toward anticipating them.

From Technology Change to Operating Model Change

Having led technology organizations through the rise of ERP systems, big data, cloud computing, smartphones and now artificial intelligence, Tinto has learned that the arrival of a new technology rarely represents the hardest part of a transformation. The more difficult challenge is ensuring that processes, data and people evolve with it.

"I can optimize the wrong process faster than the human, but I don't think this is really the transformation," he underscored.

The same applies to data. Applying increasingly sophisticated AI to poor data does not solve the underlying problem. It merely produces the wrong answer faster.

That philosophy shapes Tinto’s approach at Kimberly Clark. Rather than treating AI as another technology to layer onto existing operations, he encourages teams to reconsider processes from end-to-end, including whether work should be centralized, eliminated or fundamentally redesigned before automation is introduced.

The implications extend to jobs themselves. As AI assumes more responsibility for collecting and synthesizing information, Tinto sees employees spending less time assembling data and more time interpreting it, challenging assumptions and asking better questions.

Building AI Skills Across the Enterprise

That transition makes AI literacy increasingly important. Tinto highlighted that simply giving an employee access to Copilot, ChatGPT or another generative AI tool does not mean that person will know how to use it effectively.

Kimberly Clark is therefore focusing on helping employees understand the technology, the data available to them and the responsibilities that come with using both. Protecting intellectual property and establishing appropriate governance are essential parts of that education.

When discussing whether organizations will eventually encounter AI scenarios their existing controls fail to anticipate, Tinto emphasized that it is inevitably a matter of when, not if. That reality means AI governance cannot be static. Guardrails will need to expand, tighten and evolve as new capabilities and use cases emerge.

Across the supply chain, consumer engagement and the back office, Tinto's message is remarkably consistent. The technology itself is rarely the most difficult part. Creating sustainable value from it requires the right data, redesigned processes and people prepared to work differently.

For a company that has remained relevant for more than a century and a half, that willingness to continually reinvent how work gets done may prove as important to Kimberly Clark's next chapter as any individual technology.

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy , a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble . He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on X @PeterAHigh .