Erich Gazaui is the Chief Information Officer at Papa, a company that connects health plan members with companionship and support services. In this role, he leads information strategy, governance, and operational enablement across the organization, overseeing a scope that extends well beyond traditional IT to include enterprise application management, company-wide procurement, and security. He is known for reframing the CIO seat as an intelligence function, one focused not on keeping systems running but on ensuring that information is accurate, accessible, and actively used to drive better decisions.
Gazaui spent much of his career in startup environments, building out IT operations and internal service management before ascending to executive leadership. That arc gave him direct exposure to how the CIO role shifts when an organization matures from reactive support to strategic business partner. He has held CIO positions at multiple high-growth technology companies, including a four-year tenure at ZipRecruiter, where he developed the cross-functional fluency that now defines his leadership approach.
He is unusually fluent across departments. Gazaui speaks with equal confidence about procurement structure, financial classification, people operations, and governance, and he views that range as essential to the modern CIO mandate. Finance teams at companies where he has worked have called him an honorary member of their group, a distinction he attributes to understanding GAAP, forecast-based language, and the cost-of-revenue implications of technology decisions.
At Papa, he operates in a regulated healthcare environment where information integrity and security are not optional. That context shapes how he approaches AI readiness, vendor governance, and the trust-building work that prevents shadow IT from taking root.
Erich Gazaui joined Go Beyond the Connection to discuss how the CIO role has evolved into an institutional intelligence mandate, what it takes to earn a real seat at the leadership table, and why the most powerful thing a technology leader can build is not a system, but a relationship.
Gazaui’s defining argument is that a system without governance is often worse than no system at all, because it lets stale information quietly corrupt the decisions built around it.
Erich Gazaui, Chief Information Officer at Papa, makes the case that the CIO mandate is fundamentally about information architecture, not systems management. He explains how governance, access, and advocacy for accurate data transform the role into a strategic driver of business outcomes.
