Anna Maria Blengino

When Anna Maria Blengino took the role of Chief Information Officer at Sunrise in April 2023, she brought with her two decades of experience in Switzerland's telecommunications sector. Her career path, including positions across IT testing, operations, software delivery and strategy at Sunrise, interspersed with four years in banking at UBS, has shaped her approach to digital transformation.

Originally from Italy and a Swiss citizen since 2008, Anna Maria holds a master's degree in engineering from Turin Polytechnic and an INSEAD executive management certificate. This technical foundation, combined with her banking sector experience, informs her current role leading a team of 180 employees at Switzerland's second-largest telecommunications provider.

“The demand for digital infrastructure has grown exponentially over the last 20 years,” she explains, reflecting on the industry’s evolution. “Access to fast and reliable internet connections has become crucial in everybody's daily private and work life, at the same it is a commodity today, with billions of users worldwide.”

Under Anna Maria’s leadership, Sunrise’s CIO unit has embarked on a comprehensive transformation programme. The initiative spans cloud migration, AI implementation and operational automation, whilst maintaining focus on the company’s core mission of providing telecommunications services to Swiss customers.

Her approach to transformation emphasises practical innovation. “By establishing a unified data platform to aggregate data from various sources and using AI/ML models to generate actionable insights for personalised customer experiences, predictive maintenance and fraud detection, we drive customer retention and loyalty,” she explains.

Anna Maria has established an AI community of practice to coordinate artificial intelligence initiatives across Sunrise. “As with any new emerging trend, initially a lot of pioneers in Sunrise started to experiment with AI independently,” she notes. “To share our experiences and to organise our next joint steps forward, we have created an AI community of practice, governed by the CIO unit but with the contribution of all business units.”

Strategic partnerships form a crucial element of her transformation strategy. “Our technology partners play a key role in our pursuit of excellence and therefore our partnership approach is a strategic matter governed at executive level,” she explains. Her criteria for partner selection emphasise two main attributes: “Its ability to fully understand and embed Sunrise’s needs and strategic objectives in its solutions and a proactive and curious mindset, with the courage to challenge and the hunger to learn.”

Talent development represents another key focus area. Sunrise has established partnerships with Swiss and European universities to recruit graduates and operates a four-year apprenticeship programme for IT professionals. “We believe in the mix of perspectives, backgrounds, experiences and talents to assemble a winning team,” she notes.

Looking ahead, Anna Maria sees continuing evolution in the telecommunications sector. “Technology in the telecom industry is moving toward a future of hyper-connectivity, real-time responsiveness, and intelligent automation,” she observes. Cross-industry collaboration represents a growing focus, with telecommunications providers increasingly partnering with automotive, healthcare and manufacturing sectors.

For Switzerland’s second-largest telecommunications provider, the future lies in balancing innovation with the reliability that Swiss customers expect. “Sunrise is committed to continue its focus on delivering exceptional quality and great services at the right cost,” Anna Maria concludes. “The new offers around digital services will mean that our customers will have even more options and services at their fingertip.”

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