Perennial points dominate immediately’s CIO agenda: find out how to drive innovation whereas guaranteeing safe and trendy IT operations, a workforce tuned for the long run, and a steadiness sheet ready to comprise prices as they fluctuate.
However whereas CIO.com’s latest State of the CIO survey identifies AI initiatives, safety work, modernization efforts, and expertise wants as prime drivers for IT leaders’ agendas once more this yr, refined shifts in how finest to sort out that work may be teased out by the important thing questions IT leaders face in every of those areas proper now.
Right here, IT leaders and advisors weigh in on what CIOs have to ask and reply about their IT methods and execution involving immediately’s most important IT issues.
1. How can I guarantee AI implementations ship excessive worth, securely?
The times of focusing totally on AI experimentation and proofs of ideas are in the past. Now, chief executives want their CIOs to establish how AI can ship measurable worth to the group, says Mark Taylor, CEO of the Society for Info Administration (SIM), a nonprofit skilled affiliation.
That, he says, is forcing CIOs to ask, “The place are the high-value AI implementations?”
For Saby Waraich, CIO of Clackamas Group School, this breaks down into defining what makes an incredible use case for AI and figuring out how finest to attain probably the most enterprise worth from these implementations.
Waraich, who can also be president of the SIM Portland, Ore., chapter, says that lens helps him and his group prioritize AI initiatives primarily based on anticipated ROIs, as a substitute of enthusiasm and pleasure.
For instance, Waraich not too long ago built-in generative AI instruments into the faculty’s cybersecurity processes. The AI analyzes whether or not emails reported as suspicious are phishing makes an attempt, alerts safety workers to the outcomes, and drafts responses again to the customers who reported the suspect messages. It might not be a flashy undertaking, but it surely has delivered huge returns. The AI instruments can full in about 10 minutes the work that sometimes took staffers a couple of hours to sort out — a major productiveness acquire.
CIOs should discover huge wins like that, in keeping with Tejas Patel, chief of tech technique and advisory for APAC at skilled providers agency Accenture. And CIOs they have to take into account how they will construct on these wins as effectively, he says.
As such, Patel advises CIOs to ask, “How do I scale gen AI security and with velocity with out taking over lots of technologic debt?”
CIOs, he explains, have to shortly scale AI deployments to make sure their organizations keep aggressive as a result of the know-how is evolving so quick that they threat quickly falling behind in the event that they don’t. In addition they have to be cautious in regards to the AI instruments they undertake to make sure those they decide will preserve tempo with that evolution. And so they should be consistently diligent about safety much less they introduce unacceptable ranges of threat round exposing knowledge — whether or not that’s to cyberattacks or in ways in which violate rules or the belief of consumers or workers.
Patel acknowledges the problem CIOs face in balancing all these parts. “With pressures and prices which are ongoing, CIOs know they need to be good and extra deliberate of their AI technique,” he provides.
2. Are our safety operations tuned for resiliency and our group’s threat urge for food?
CIOs together with their govt colleagues and board members “understand that hacks and disruptions by unhealthy actors are an inevitability,” SIM’s Taylor says. That realization has shifted safety packages from being largely defensive measures to ones that repeatedly evolve the group’s means to establish breaches shortly, reply quickly, and return to operations as quick as doable, Taylor says.
The aim immediately is ensuring resiliency — even because the unhealthy actors and their assault methods evolve. And that requires safety operations which are agile sufficient to each adapt to an ever-evolving menace panorama and align with the organization’s potentially altering risk tolerance.
“We’re asking, ‘How will we frequently mature? How will we get higher? How will we turn out to be a extra mature group?’” says Joshua Bellendir, senior vp of IT and CIO of retailer WHSmith North America.
3. What infrastructure adjustments will guarantee IT delivers on the velocity of enterprise?
Thomas Phelps IV, CIO of Laserfiche and an advisory board member for the SIM Analysis Institute, says guaranteeing IT operations can reply to a quickly altering enterprise local weather is the important thing issue he makes use of to find out what applied sciences to interchange and what new investments to make.
Constructing a tech stack that may develop and retract with enterprise wants, and that may evolve shortly to capitalize on an ever-shifting know-how panorama, isn’t any simple feat, Phelps and different IT leaders readily admit.
“In modernizing, it’s such a shifting goal, as a result of as soon as you bought it modernized, one thing new can come out that’s higher and extra automated. Your entire infrastructure is evolving so shortly,” says Diane Gutiw, vp and international AI analysis lead at CGI, an IT and enterprise consulting providers agency.
There are methods to assist deal with that problem, says SIM’s Taylor, who advises CIOs to concentrate on knowledge entry when tuning their IT stacks, as success on this period of AI and automation closely is dependent upon knowledge attending to the place it’s wanted.
Brian Jackson, principal analysis director at Data-Tech Analysis Group, agrees: “It’s about discovering options that may deliver knowledge out of previous methods and onto a brand new airplane the place [organizations] can assess it and use it with trendy AI methods.”
Accenture’s Patel stresses that doing so with higher equip CIOs to “leverage automation, AI, and brokers, with the ambition of being zero contact [for IT operations].” The important thing to a responsive infrastructure, Patel explains, is to get rid of as a lot guide effort as doable.
“Zero contact” operations, he argues, will increase velocity and reduces prices, enabling CIOs to divert money from operations expenses to innovation — making their IT departments (along with the tech stack) a totally trendy entity.
“The aim is to make extra of my operations lean and imply to redirect sources to creating new capabilities,” Patel says.
4. How do I futureproof my workforce?
For Data-Tech’s Jackson, CIOs’ long-term success is dependent upon frequently figuring out the talents wanted to tug forward of the competitors and devising expertise methods that guarantee they rent and practice for these expertise with a watch towards the long run.
Phelps agrees {that a} robust upskilling and reskilling technique is important to creating the suitable capabilities to develop the enterprise, whereas CGI’s Gutiw will get a bit extra particular, saying it’s all about guaranteeing they’ve expertise that is aware of find out how to use AI to get their jobs performed higher and sooner.
As Gutiw factors out, analysis exhibits that staff who don’t know find out how to use AI might be displaced not a lot by the know-how itself however by different staff who know find out how to work with and alongside AI.
Consequently, she says CIOs ought to ask whether or not they and their managers are prepared for a hybrid workforce, one the place human staff and AI staff are built-in.
“CIOs ought to be asking, ‘How do I alter or adapt what I do now to have the ability to handle a hybrid workforce? What does the way forward for work seem like? How do I handle that in a safe, accountable approach and nonetheless benefit from the efficiencies? And the way do I let my workers be revolutionary with out violating regulation?’” Gutiw says, noting that immediately’s managers “are the final technology of people that will solely handle folks.”
Accenture’s Patel agrees that CIOs ought to be seeking to create “the suitable working mannequin within the group so people and machines can collaborate and drive exponential worth.”
He provides, “CIOs have to be ensuring folks see this as a possibility, that there’s profession development and development with AI coming in.”
5. How do I management prices so I can spend extra on innovation?
Many organizations proceed to put money into IT, with 65% of respondents to the 2025 State of the CIO survey saying they anticipate IT funding will increase — with a mean enhance of 6.9%.
Nevertheless, CIOs say the worth tag on managing and sustaining their present tech stack has elevated at a better clip, as have new implementations and innovation.
Data-Tech’s Jackson attributes a lot of that sticker shock to spikes in the cost of cloud services. “CIOs are seeing greater than anticipated payments, and so they’re even speaking about repatriating some workloads,” he notes.
Jackson says an rising share of CIOs are adopting FinOps to regulate these run prices. CIOs are also reevaluating what should run in the cloud and what may run elsewhere, discovering {that a} extra consideration to cloud operations will help decrease bills.
Moreover, IT leaders are rationalizing and renegotiating vendor contracts and services to maintain prices in examine.
It’s essential to notice, nevertheless, that such work isn’t merely about decreasing IT spend — as it might have been in previous years, Jackson says. Relatively, that work helps CIOs lower prices on low-value duties, comparable to upkeep, to allow them to redeploy cash to fund work on high-value development and innovation initiatives.
Patel agrees, saying that on the subject of the IT funds, CIOs should decide the optimum steadiness amongst OpEx, CapEx, tech debt, and innovation spending.
“The query is, ‘What’s the suitable steadiness, what’s the suitable distribution?’ That’s what CIOs ought to be seeking to handle,” he says.
Phelps is concentrated on such dynamics, saying he’s analyzing his vendor contracts and providers to make sure “that they actually assist allow enterprise development and accomplish that in a approach that helps handle prices and guarantee consumer adoption of their revolutionary instruments.”
Extra importantly, maybe, he’s attentive to the allocation of cash to run/preserve, day-to-day initiatives, and innovation and ensuring “we’re allocating that spend correctly.”
