Bentley Systems CIO Talks Leadership Strategy and AI Adoption

Ruth Sleeter, CIO of engineering software company Bentley Systems, began her career in software product development. She managed product teams at NetApp before entering more senior roles that leveraged her digital strategy skills, notably at Lenovo. 

She then made the leap to the C-suite, serving as CIO at Deutsche Bank. She returned to Lenovo as CIO before moving to roles at Sonos and Axon. In March 2025, she landed in her current position as CIO at Bentley. Here, she shares her thoughts on the importance of systems thinking and the delicate process of integrating AI into the workforce. 

How did your early interest in technology develop?

My dad was also a software engineer. I grew up in the Bay Area just as Silicon Valley was starting. I suppose I was surrounded by it and didn’t know it at the time. 

I started my undergrad promising myself I would not be a music or a computer science major, because that’s what I did a ton of growing up. Regardless, I was really good at engineering and systems thinking. I took a class in discrete math in the computer science department and fell in love. I ended up getting an undergraduate degree in computer science. I was super lucky growing up, especially as a girl. I had all of these great people who encouraged me to do math and science. It was just a very natural fit to be a software engineer. That’s how I started my career as a software engineer for semiconductor software automation. 

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Did you gain any formative insights during your education?

In computer science, you start with data structure, which is just systems thinking — let’s break a big problem down into small parts and think about reusable components. That anchor — thinking and strong systems design — was very intuitive to me. People ask me how I get through my day to day, with the breadth of the information that I have to take in. The CIO role is pretty interesting. We get to spend a lot of time on strategy but at the same time, we have to make sure we’re building the right internal products. That same systems thinking that was inculcated in earning my degree, that type of thinking that sparked my interest, is exactly the type of thinking that I love doing now.  

How did your early roles help you to develop the skills you have deployed as a CIO?

I think it was my desire to try new things. I started out as a software engineer. I got into management kind of by accident during the dot com boom. I was organized and articulate. So, I spent some time learning how to manage software product teams, which is incredibly important in what I do today.  

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Then I got the opportunity to be customer-facing. If I had advice for anybody who wants to be in these types of leadership roles, it would be to spend time customer-facing. I look at my role as a customer-facing role — learning about customer empathy and how to communicate strategy and approach and understand customers’ pain and how you’re going to solve it was crucial in my career. 

How has the role of the CIO in the C-suite evolved since your first CIO position?

The thing that’s really important for a CIO to be thinking about is that we are a microcosm for how all of the business functions are trying to execute the tactics against the strategy. 

What we can do across the portfolio is represent the strategy in real terms back to the business. We can say: These are all of the different places where we’re thinking about investing. Does that match with the strategy we thought we were setting for ourselves? And where is there a delta and a difference? 

Let me give you some insight into that and then help with the discussions around strategic enablement across our highest priorities. That gets you into a strategy conversation. I see myself as a strategic leader — being able to bubble up where there may be either support or inconsistencies in how we’re executing against our strategy and investing. 

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The new challenge — and it is a real challenge — is shepherding organizations through AI adoption. Creating a very flexible approach to this problem is really important. That is the new part of the remit that is particularly energizing — a change of this magnitude in how people work every day has not happened in quite some time. 

How did you go about learning business strategy when you first entered the C-suite?

When I got my first CIO role, there was all of this conversation about business process. That was the part that I had to learn and figure out how to map into these broader, strategic conversations. I had my first internal IT role at Deutsche Bank, where we really talked about product model a lot — thinking about our internal IT deliverables as products.  

When I moved to Lenovo, we had very rich business process and transformation conversations because we were taking the whole business through such a foundational change. I was able to put those two things together. 

It was a marriage of several things: running a product organization; marrying that to the classic IT way of thinking about business process; and then determining how that becomes representative to the business strategy.  

Has the experience of being a woman in a male-dominated field changed?

It’s changed tremendously. Early in my career, I was very lucky. I did not even want to be seen as a woman in technology, because I didn’t understand why it would matter, which was a wonderfully naive place to come from at the time. I hope that’s how women feel now. I thought that we should just be measured by our results and our great engineering prowess. When I became a little bit more senior, I had this moment where I realized that more junior women were asking me questions that they wouldn’t necessarily ask somebody else. They were looking to me to be a mentor and an example. 

We went through this phase where we got to start talking about this issue very openly. I think that that’s helped us a tremendous amount. I don’t think we’re done. I think we are able to have those conversations. That is very different than where I started. 

What are some of the problems you’re working on in AI adoption?

As we think about AI adoption in the organization, taking a very human-centric approach is the first key to success. That’s a challenge for CIOs, because we tend to start talking very quickly about business processes. I don’t think that’s how to approach AI. When people are doing their work, they’re not thinking about the business process. They’re just trying to do the thing that they’re doing every day.  

The very first thing that we can do with AI is make every single person better at their jobs. Everybody wants to be better at their jobs. That’s such a safe place to be and such a productive human-first place to be. It invites people to think about how to do their own work differently, instead of expecting somebody to tell them how to use this new technology. People can have a teacher next to them. They can get advice. They can learn.