The steps nobody thought to write down

John Comacchio takes his technology team on field trips to watch people work. 

They’ve gone to the Toronto Reference Library and to a downtown park, where condo residents pull chairs together like a boardroom table, even though they don’t work for the same company.

He finds plenty to watch in hotel lobbies, too.

“Everyone’s getting ready for their meeting the next morning,” says Comacchio. “They’re sitting having coffee and breakfast, they’ve got laptops open, and they’re having meetings live.”

Teknion designs office furniture by studying how people move through a floor. Comacchio, their CIO, settled a long time ago on paying the same kind of attention inside his own company, and it’s what he’s built on for close to 25 years. 

It’s how he made the case for a laptop standard in 2012, back when that was an expensive idea, and how he worked out where the Wi-Fi access points needed to go, including the ones in the parking garage.

He is senior vice-president and chief information officer at the Toronto manufacturer, and a 2026 finalist for the CanadianCIO of the Year Award in the private sector category, presented by the CIO Association of Canada. Winners are announced in Toronto on Oct. 1.

Now he’s working on AI agents that can follow a customer order across Teknion’s divisions. The processes are documented. Nearly a year of trials has turned up the parts that aren’t, like the call somebody makes when the system says no.

The network followed people around the building

Teknion builds furniture to order, which means nothing gets made until a customer places an order, and everything is built to that customer’s spec, so the company holds no stock. No single plant finishes a product either, with one making tops, another the electricals, another the wood credenzas.

“The assembly line is your office floor, so everything arrives in stages,” says Comacchio.

Employees move constantly, between plants, between buildings, and out to half-finished campuses that have no furniture in them yet. 

So Comacchio moved the company to a laptop standard in 2012 and ran wireless through the manufacturing plants and the warehouses. 

The laptops, network, and bandwidth were all expensive then, and none of it was normal for a company Teknion’s size.

He later tried sensors to get the same picture of the buildings. Teknion’s headquarters doubles as a showroom, though, and the tour groups walking through wrecked the numbers.

So he read the network endpoints instead, watching where people connected and where they went. The executive floor turned out to need far more access points than the number of occupants, because everyone came up there for meetings.

He added coverage in the parking garage, because people were working there whether he covered it or not.

“You know how many meetings end up leaning against your car before you’re trying to go home?” Comacchio asks.

When the pandemic sent everyone home, there was enough to worry about without figuring out how anyone would log in. 

Comacchio says the laptops, bandwidth, and remote access were already in place, so employees had the ability to work from home the next day.

One of everyone, and two of no one

Teknion had gone public, bought supply chain businesses, and ended up with a set of independent technology groups each  spending their own money. 

Comacchio says the CEO and the board realized they had no chief information officer at the executive table, and hired him from Nissan, where he’d spent about 17 years, to bring it all together. The company went private again in 2008.

“We’re not a multinational, we’re a mid-cap, so we have one of everyone, two of no one,” says Comacchio.

Nobody could be seconded to a project full time, because everybody already had a full-time job. 

The person who decided whether a change went ahead was often a single person inside one division. So he arrived with something to offer rather than something to impose, starting with disaster recovery and a worldwide network that none of them could have afforded alone.

He also picked up nemawashi at Nissan, the Japanese practice of lining up an agreement before a decision reaches the room.

“One thing I refuse to be is a servant,” says Comacchio. “And I always tell young CIOs that. Don’t become a servant. You have to be a service. You have to be participative, but people have to hear your voice.”

Comacchio put the project budget under the executive team instead of inside the IT budget, so every project carries an executive co-sponsor from the business. 

The IT budget covers running the company, but the projects belong to everyone.

When he goes to the executive team for security money, he leads with what a breach would cost, which is always the bigger number.

Teknion’s customers are large multinationals and governments, and Comacchio says some of their requests for proposals have as many as 40 pages of  questions about his security, interruption, and disaster plans. 

He points out that Teknion has walked away from its own suppliers over breaches, and that the same thing can happen to Teknion.

What he says he can’t get ahead of is technical debt, and he thinks it’s possibly a bigger problem in Canadian companies because of how hard it is to raise the capital to replace things.

“Every time we get something to green, it turns yellow pretty fast,” says Comacchio.

Nobody wrote down the part where you call so-and-so

Teknion was already paying for Gemini as part of its Google Workspace. About two years ago his team opened it up, and started running monthly sessions where people showed each other what they’d made.

The stated goal was better outcomes, and he told staff the company was not looking to cut jobs with it.

Manufacturing engineers started feeding machine data into Gemini and built themselves a dashboard, then put it on the plant screens at shift change, which made the case for preventive maintenance something a supervisor could point at.

They fed the information into Gemini, built themselves a dashboard, and put it on the plant screens at shift change, which made the case for preventive maintenance something a supervisor could point at.

Marketing found it could take one photograph and change the room around the product, swapping the setting, the fabric, and the finish, which is a lot of catalogue for one afternoon with a camera.

Comacchio says that work stays on a short leash, because the company can’t have a chair that doesn’t look like one of its chairs, and AI is fickle with its flaws. 

Embedding AI inside Teknion’s other software came next, and Comacchio calls that the easy button, because the data inside those systems is understood and the evaluation sets already exist.

Then he went to the agents, and the easy button ran out.

Comacchio explains it to his executives by talking about hiring, where the job description is the thing that tells you whether the CV in front of you is worth anything.

An agent doing a real job at Teknion doesn’t get a job description. The closest thing is the written version of how the work gets done, which is missing things.

“There’s that institutional knowledge where if this doesn’t work, I call so-and-so, I call so-and-so, I look at this other screen,” says Comacchio. “Well, I have a spreadsheet that I’ve been collecting of that anomalous data.”

Every department does the job its own way, and an order goes through all of them. An agent following that order has to know how each one works.

Comacchio’s still working on it. Teknion sells into the EU, Canada, India, and the U.S., and he says the company has to meet the data rules in all of them at once, which is part of what he’s untangling before an agent touches anything.

Comacchio says the industry stopped thinking about quantum when AI arrived. About 35% of Teknion’s sales are products built or altered to a customer’s specification, and he first wants to know what quantum would do to the speed of engineering that work.

Comacchio says the technology changes constantly and the people don’t, which is why he goes out and looks at them in the first place. He’s watched them in the library, in the park, in his own parking garage, and everything he’s built came out of that.

The agents have run into the part of the job that happens where nobody’s watching. It’s in somebody’s head, in the call they make when the system says no, and there’s no field trip that turns it up. He’s going to have to ask.

Final shots

• Check an agent’s work against the written process and you’re checking it against a version of the job nobody does.
• When employees get room to build with approved tools, they can surface problems they never brought to IT.
• Divisions run vertically and a customer order runs horizontally through all of them, which is the route an agent has to learn before it’s useful.

This article is part of a series profiling the finalists for the 2026 CanadianCIO of the Year Awards, private sector category, presented by the CIO Association of Canada. The winner will be announced Oct. 1 in Toronto. Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.