The strategy stories enterprise IT leaders actually read.
Volume 343, Issue 3 · 20 articles from 5 issues
A few CIOs are using generative AI to rewrite code, redesign workflows and migrate databases, cutting modernization time and cost.
IT leaders hunting for AI use cases may be overlooking IT modernization itself, where a handful of large-enterprise CIOs have used generative AI to rewrite code, redesign workflows and migrate databases.
Avaya says AI tools can cut contact-center modernization from months to days, and Ensono uses AI for code discovery and legacy cleanup.
Gartner's Arun Chandrasekaran sees strong potential in requirements gathering, legacy code mapping and code QA, though hallucinations still hinder results and governance and data foundations must come first.
Mead Johnson Nutrition's CIO Rama Donepudi describes using gen AI and automation in a transformation that began in 2024.
Gartner: just 4% of CIOs plan to redesign roles for a human-agent workforce, though those that do are 2.4x likelier to be AI leaders.
A Gartner survey of 2,002 CIOs and technology executives found just 4% have plans to retool roles for a combined human and AI agent workforce.
Enterprises that do are 2.4 times more likely to be top AI performers with CEOs reporting value.
Cost pressure dominates: 58% report more demand to deliver cost improvements from prior AI investments, and only 13% report significant value from AI, which has pushed talent planning down the list.
Gartner's Alicia Mullery says CIOs can raise their strategic standing by leading C-suite conversations about AI's effect on roles and salaries.
Business executives tell TechTarget where CIOs should speed up AI, such as training and internal automation, and where to brake.
Only 13% of CIOs say their enterprise has realized significant value from AI, according to Gartner, yet CEOs fear AI-native competitors could undercut them.
TechTarget asked CEOs, founders and business executives where IT should move fast and where it should hold back, and they called for faster training, experimentation and internal automation but tight controls on customer-facing AI actions and caution about dependence on AI vendors.
One executive described AI as a threat to their business model that demands moving faster than is comfortable.
Others said CIOs must hire for new AI skills, even if most companies won't train their own models.
A hub-and-spoke operating model lets CIOs scale AI beyond pilots, with central governance and business-unit ownership of delivery.
Most large companies run AI pilots, but few have turned them into enterprise-wide capability.
Citing Gartner, the article says 40% of executives have put AI into select processes and 38% are still testing, with governance the top barrier to scaling, ahead of data quality and talent.
Central AI teams get buried in requests while business units build ungoverned tools, so the recommended hub-and-spoke model has a central team set strategy, platforms and governance while business units own delivery, budgets and results.
It also notes the top five use cases often deliver up to 70% of productivity gains.
Gartner's Gene Alvarez says AI is developing in an architectural vacuum and outlines trends CIOs should adopt, from agent identity to context layers.
At Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, analyst Gene Alvarez warned that AI systems are being built in an architectural vacuum and said CIOs must become "active architects," since the vacuum creates unmanaged credential paths and pushes companies toward single-vendor dependence.
The trends include identity and boundary controls for AI agents, since Gartner predicts a quarter of breaches will trace to agent abuse by 2028, as well as AI coding harnesses that govern autonomous developer tools and context layers or ontologies that teach agents how the business works.
Gartner predicts that prioritizing context could raise agentic accuracy by up to 80% and cut costs by up to 60% by 2027.
Alvarez advised matching adoption timing to organizational maturity.
CIOs at Gartner Symposium named their top AI worries, from overreaching agents to unclear control and consumer agents with weak boundaries.
CIO Dive asked technology executives at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo about their biggest AI concerns, and Capital One Software's Prashant Prahlad said not adopting AI would be an "extinction event."
He added that the Hugging Face incident shows how much the industry still has to learn about agent autonomy and access, and warned against over-securing systems.
Heineken USA CIO Frank Iannella worries about the pace of change and about who actually controls AI systems.
Bowdoin College CIO Michael Cato is most concerned about free consumer agents such as Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, which he says offer few security boundaries.
As AI lets business teams build their own software, the CIO's role shifts from controlling capability to providing judgment on what to build.
IT's authority used to rest on having capabilities nobody else had, but AI has ended that: a marketing team can now build a customer-facing prototype over a weekend with tools IT never evaluated.
The authors cite a survey in which 58% of AI users say they now produce work they couldn't a year ago, and warn that IT risks being bypassed as core technology decisions move to people who lack the context.
The constraint has shifted from the ability to build to agreeing on what to build, because product management, design and governance have not scaled as fast.
The authors argue that CIOs should provide clarity and disciplined judgment on where AI drives growth and avoid a string of costly experiments.
GitLab's CIO says AI governance must move from gatekeeping queues to being present where employees build tools and agents.
GitLab CIO Manu Narayan writes that employees across functions now use approved AI tools to build production code, workflows and agents without visibility into what others have built.
When formal channels are slow, teams build on their own, leading to duplicated effort, siloed tooling and diverging security practices.
Governance teams stay busy reviewing visible requests while the riskiest work never enters the queue.
Citing Gartner's prediction of more than 150,000 agents per Fortune 500 firm by 2028, he argues against tighter controls that push experimentation underground and for governance that travels with the work.
NASCIO's 2026 survey shows state CIOs expect more disruption and now treat modernization as business transformation, not just tech upgrades.
NASCIO's 2026 survey of 51 state and territorial CIOs found 90% expect more turbulence in their roles over the next five years, with 39 gubernatorial elections approaching.
CIOs from Texas and Florida described modernization as changing how government operates rather than upgrading hardware and software, with Florida weighing centralization against federated agency IT and Texas building a single front door for citizen services.
66% of CIOs say they lack funding to balance immediate needs with future investment, and 32% cite a lack of trust as a barrier to digital services.
A CEO's guide to leading through a cyber crisis: involve counsel early, set decision authority and communicate only verified facts.
Writing as a CEO who regularly fields calls from executives facing a breach, the author lays out how leadership teams should prepare for systems going dark.
Bring legal counsel in from the outset, since how counsel structures the investigation affects privilege, while containment proceeds in parallel, and establish decision-making authority before a crisis, including backups when key leaders are unavailable.
Communicate what you know rather than what you assume, and tell customers when to expect updates.
Identify which operations must be restored first, test recovery, and rehearse the decisions with tabletop exercises, the vendor-authored post advises.
Unchecked messaging and collaboration tools create costly sprawl and confusion that CIOs must untangle with strategy and inventory.
Repeatedly adding messaging and collaboration platforms creates employee confusion and costly sprawl.
Blue Mantis CIO Richard Amos says companies should treat collaboration platforms as strategic assets, starting with a clear strategy and a full inventory of overlapping tools.
ISG's David Menninger notes a trend toward integrated collaborative AI suites combining voice, video, messaging, documents and agentic automation. LogicMonitor's Karthik Sj warns that scattering alerts, tickets and chat across Slack, Teams, ServiceNow and email fragments context and slows incident decisions.
CIOs must define where agents may act autonomously and where they must be kept out of operations entirely.
The CIO's job in an agentic environment is increasingly to define the scenarios in which agents can operate with full autonomy, those where they need human confirmation, and those where they should be kept out of operations entirely.
That is a business-risk judgment rather than a technical one, and it has to be made per process rather than as a blanket policy.
The article covers how technology leaders are working with business owners to draw those lines, and why leaving the decision to individual teams produces inconsistent risk exposure across the organization.
As AI spreads beyond IT, ownership should be split: business leaders own outcomes, CIOs own architecture, and CEOs set risk appetite.
As AI spreads beyond IT, engineering teams are exhausting annual AI budgets in months and coding agents are changing records they shouldn't touch, making governance as important as technical capability.
Kashyap Kompella argues that business leaders should own the results of the AI they deploy, CIOs and CTOs should own architecture, integration and reliability, finance should judge whether the spending is justified, and the CEO sets overall AI direction and risk appetite.
Holding a CIO accountable for outcomes another unit controls creates responsibility without authority.
In an insurer's claims AI, for example, the claims executive should decide which claims can skip human review.
Workday's agentic and headless push at Rising shows why data quality and CIO leadership are prerequisites for success.
At Workday Rising, the vendor expanded its Sana agentic platform and opened headless capabilities that separate back-end systems from the user interface, with Sana using the Model Context Protocol to work inside tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Gemini Enterprise and Slack.
Columnist Myles Suer contrasts Workday's approach with SAP, which is exposing APIs, and Salesforce, which wants to be the UI of choice.
Agents such as a concierge for HR and IT requests could resolve onboarding and password resets before they become tickets.
He argues CIOs must ensure high-fidelity data and governance to benefit.
Executive coach Jessica Kral finds tech leaders' biggest AI-era challenge is guiding people through uncertainty.
Former CIO and executive coach Jessica Kral interviewed seven technology C-suite leaders for the Heller Search blog and found that, while AI was the catalyst, their deepest challenge was leading teams and partners through rapid change and uncertainty.
Leaders describe an unprecedented pace and an expectation of fast outcomes rather than proofs of concept, which pushes even capable executives back into old habits.
Those who thrive stay honest about what they don't know, translate ambiguity into direction and keep people at the center.
PwC's survey of 4,000 leaders finds no consensus on who is accountable for agentic AI risk and security.
PwC's Digital Trust Insights 2027 report, which surveyed about 4,000 business and technology leaders in 71 countries, found accountability for AI risk is split: 29% place it with the CIO or CTO, 17% with the CISO, 26% with a dedicated AI leader, and 11% say it is unclear.
About a third of organizations have created dedicated AI roles, and 47% say cybersecurity is a standing board agenda item.
The article suggests a possible new chief AI security officer role and, citing RSA, applying human-style identity controls to agents, such as registering sanctioned agents and tying each to a human owner who approves high-risk actions.
A CIO who faced 1,500+ applications argues tech sprawl and debt, not models, are what block enterprise AI.
In a CIO.com column, Shannon Bell argues that enterprise AI ambition is outpacing execution because of complexity built into IT environments, not the technology itself, noting that after years of growth and acquisitions the author's organization had more than 1,500 applications to operate and secure across hybrid environments.
AI inherits that complexity and often exposes technical debt, and 68% of CIOs say debt from past integrations blocks scaling AI.
Bell recommends reducing the tech stack, building in human control and ensuring strong data quality and governance.
One in four agentic AI users has no defined accountability for post-deployment monitoring, an EY report finds.
Senior AI leaders surveyed by EY say governance frameworks have not been updated for the technology's specific risks, and organizations keep bypassing the protocols they do have despite well-documented security incidents.
Among respondents using agentic AI, around one in four said accountability for maintaining or monitoring it after deployment was undefined.
The recommended approach is embedding governance into the AI development and deployment lifecycle with clear requirements for testing, approval, monitoring and escalation, plus an explicit exception process naming who can authorize an expedited deployment and what additional controls or post-deployment reviews apply.
Burnout and growing workloads are driving more organizations to consider a deputy CISO, though the role varies widely.
Mounting CISO burdens and burnout are spurring interest in the deputy CISO role, which has no standard definition and may support risk management, board engagement or succession planning.
IANS found 31% of Fortune 500-sized companies employ a dedicated deputy, with another 13% combining the role with another position, and compensation can range from $240,000 to $419,000.
Mike Buratowski, The Home Depot's first deputy CISO, says the role ensures someone can make emergency and tactical decisions and acts as a force multiplier. At Home Depot, the CISO leads strategy while deputies focus on operations and compliance.
Organizations where CISOs and CFOs align on risk and investment are better prepared for today's threats.
Dark Reading's George V. Hulme writes that the CISO-CFO relationship has evolved from budget transactions into a strategic alliance that shapes security posture and resilience, yet PwC found only 47% of CISOs join CFOs in strategic planning on cybersecurity investments and just 26% of companies have controls to respond rapidly to threats.
Fortalice CEO Theresa Payton says today's CISO must bridge divides and make security a business enabler.
Experts including Deel's Adam Ennamli urge CISOs to speak the language of financial risk to win funding, executive support and alignment.