Mayo Clinic Names New CIO As It Expands Its AI Strategy

Mayo Clinic appointed Arun Kumar Bhaskara-Baba as Chief Information Officer (CIO) in May, bringing in a technology executive with experience scaling artificial intelligence at Honeywell Aerospace and Defense.

Bhaskara-Baba joined the Minnesota-based academic medical center after serving as CIO of Honeywell Aerospace and Defense, where he led digital strategy and expanded the company’s AI capabilities. He previously held technology leadership roles at pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson and Dell.

At Mayo Clinic, Bhaskara-Baba oversees information technology systems across 16 hospitals and 45 multispecialty clinics. He succeeded Cris Ross, who retired in 2024 after 12 years as CIO.

His appointment comes as Mayo expands its use of AI across clinical research, infrastructure and healthcare applications.

Mayo Builds AI Infrastructure And Models

In June, Mayo Clinic and Microsoft announced a collaboration to develop a frontier AI model for healthcare. The model is intended to support clinical reasoning, including earlier diagnosis and treatment planning, by combining Mayo’s clinical expertise and data with Microsoft’s AI and cloud capabilities. Mayo Clinic and Microsoft’s healthcare AI collaboration provides more context on the initiative.

Mayo said it would own the model, while Microsoft planned to make it available through Azure Foundry APIs. The organizations said the collaboration would focus on developing AI that can address complex healthcare problems and support clinical decision-making.

Mayo has also invested in the computing infrastructure needed to develop larger AI models. In 2025, it deployed an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD based on NVIDIA Blackwell technology to support work in pathomics, drug discovery and precision medicine.

The system was designed to support generative AI and multimodal digital pathology models. Mayo said the infrastructure could reduce the computational time for some pathology work from about four weeks to one week.

The health system's AI work extends into clinical research. In April, Mayo reported that an AI model designed to detect pancreatic cancer from CT scans identified 73% of cancers in a validation study involving nearly 2,000 scans.

AI Moves Further Into Mayo’s Clinical Work

Mayo has been developing AI applications across research and clinical settings rather than limiting its efforts to a single model or infrastructure project.

Its researchers have used AI to analyze medical images and identify potential disease earlier, while its Biomedical Informatics group has applied AI to help identify clinical trials for patients.

The health system also hosted an AI Research Summit in June that brought together more than 750 researchers, clinicians, AI scientists, engineers and students. Mayo highlighted multi-agent AI and decision-intelligence systems as areas of interest as healthcare AI develops.

The appointment of Bhaskara-Baba adds an experienced technology executive to an organization that is expanding its AI capabilities across its research and clinical operations. His previous experience at Honeywell includes scaling AI systems, while his earlier roles included work spanning manufacturing IT, risk management, quality, compliance and information security.

Mayo’s strategy also reflects a wider push by health systems to integrate AI into clinical and operational workflows. For example, health systems are expanding AI directly into clinical workflows, including through integrations with electronic health record systems.

For Mayo, the new CIO role comes as AI becomes increasingly connected to the infrastructure, research and clinical systems that underpin its operations. The appointment itself does not establish that Bhaskara-Baba was hired specifically to lead Mayo’s AI strategy, but his background in scaling AI capabilities aligns with the health system’s expanding technology agenda.