CMO & Business Director at Squadra is a finalist for the 2026 IT Executive of the Year award
Rafael Cichini, CMO & Business Director at Squadra, is one of the finalists for the 2026 IT Executive of the Year Award, in the Sustainability category.
The award, presented annually since 2001 by IT Fórum, recognizes and honors IT leaders who have led projects of high technological and organizational impact.
Cichini is one of the executives who led the global social impact project, in partnership with Microsoft, which boosted the performance of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF), an organization that works on the prevention and fight against pediatric HIV.
How Squadra brought AI to a global health operation
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation (EGPAF) works on preventing the vertical transmission of HIV and treating patients in 12 countries. Like many large organizations, it had enough data to answer strategic questions, but lacked a quick way to consult it.
The data was scattered across national health information systems that did not communicate with each other. Comparing indicators between countries required manual work, and generating reports took months. Traditional BI tools did not solve the questions asked in business language by non-programmers.
The approach that worked in the EGPAF project reverses the usual order.
Centralize, then converse with the agents
Instead of starting with the AI assistant, it began with the foundation. Data was consolidated into a data lakehouse, with pipelines and a metadata framework that standardizes information across countries.
Only then did the conversational layer come in. The assistant receives questions in natural business language, converts them into structured queries, and returns charts, summaries, and indicators.
The thesis is simple: a language model is only as reliable as the data and retrieval layer beneath it. Without standardization, the assistant merely responds faster with inconsistent information.
The project's stated outcome is the reduction of the reporting generation cycle and the expansion of the analytical scope to more indicators and combinations of clinical data, with measurable social impact on global health.
The next criterion for success is trust
In the coming years, the difference between organizations that use AI and organizations that benefit from it should be less about access to models and more about discipline regarding the data that feeds the answers. In global health, this rigor is crucial.
The bottleneck is rarely in the model and almost always in integration, governance, and trust in the numbers.
To learn more about the case that positioned Squadra's CMO & Business Director, Rafael Cichini, among the finalists for the 2026 IT Executive of the Year award, access it here.
