Is AI making the CIO role harder? IT leaders respond

Has AI made the CIO job harder?

It certainly has, but from a CIO standpoint, there's a lot of upside. I have a help desk agent, and users can talk to an AI agent that can say, "Hey, if your mouse is acting funny, unplug it and re-plug it," and maybe resolve that issue before they call a help desk person.

However, the security side poses many risks because we get much more noise in the environment as agents do things. I have a SOC agent that handles many of our alerts, runs automated investigations on them and tends to tee up the things a human should look at. It suppresses a lot of that noise, but it lets us scale, which in turn creates more noise, alert fatigue and other issues.

-- Tony Garcia, chief information and security officer, Infineo

AI has changed some elements of my role, but they've always been there. Responsibility means always looking around the next curve and staying aware of what's happening in the market. We're always looking for that next S-curve, so I don't know that it's made it harder.

However, the speed of change over the past two and a half years has been breakneck. So that has been true, but it's the same thing we've been dealing with forever: technology changes.

If I go back to when AWS was launching, people came out with private cloud infrastructure to combat the migration to AWS. At that time, it felt like a lot was happening in a short period of time. Things go faster now. But it's still the same thing -- we're still back to the beginning.

One thing that's challenging organizations -- I hear this from clients -- is that they're considering developing their own custom CRMs and ERPs. I've lived that in past lives, and that's one of those things where I go, "Is that a world you want to live in?" because you start being responsible for [maintaining your own systems], whereas your money is typically made not in creating an internal product to deliver to internal people. You make money by doing something other than IT development, typically.

I've been hearing that come up a lot more as people have talked about the ability to code exactly what they want, and I just see history repeating itself.

-- Jim Begley, CTO, ARG

AI has definitely made the CIO's job more complex, but not necessarily harder. The CIO is no longer just responsible for technology delivery.

In many ways, AI has elevated the importance of the CIO role more than it has complicated it.

AI has raised expectations in the boardroom, with executives wanting results quickly, while at the same time increasing the risks around data privacy, intellectual property and responsible use.

The most successful CIOs are shifting from being technology operators that simply keep the lights on to business strategists, ensuring AI creates measurable business value while maintaining trust, security and control. In many ways, AI has elevated the importance of the CIO role more than it has complicated it.

-- Eric Helmer, global CTO, Rimini Street

Absolutely. AI has expanded the CIO's mandate while making the technology landscape more difficult to govern, especially with shadow AI, where everybody -- not only tech staff -- has tech knowledge at their fingertips.

Earlier, the CIO used to manage technology to meet expectations, but those expectations are on AI steroids now.

CIOs also now must deal with dozens of models, a weekly-changing pricing landscape, demand for AI agents, data and security risks, new infrastructure economics and business units that can adopt AI without waiting for IT. At the same time, the board and CEO expect the CIO to explain what the company is getting for all this AI investment. That creates a tough balancing act.

At times, the CIO also needs to justify why AI should remain in their realm instead of having a new chief AI officer reporting to the CEO. That puts existential pressure on a CIO.

-- Manish Jain, founder and principal analyst, Strategic Horizon Research

Yes, I think it has. AI gives us more ways to solve problems, but it also adds decisions about where we can trust the technology and how much authority to give it. Getting something to work in a demonstration is only the beginning. I still need to know who is responsible when it gets something wrong and how a person can step in.

For me, the DeVry context adds another dimension. I have to think about how we use AI to operate the university, while also considering what it means for the work our students are preparing to do. That makes the conversation broader than a technology purchase.

I see more of the CIO's job becoming work with other leaders on how their teams operate. If AI changes a process, the leader responsible for that process must help define success and own the result. I can help make the technology useful and trustworthy, but that responsibility must be shared.

-- Chris Campbell, CIO, DeVry University

Absolutely, but it has also made it more rewarding. 

It's harder because it's drastically changed expectations around the pace of innovation and made it more difficult to stay in front of rapidly evolving capabilities. Our stakeholders expect us to use AI to create value faster and more easily than before. They also expect us to stay informed about new capabilities AI is introducing, which change on an almost-weekly basis.

It's more rewarding because we can now solve problems through technology that we couldn't solve previously. Being able to sit with our associates and quickly improve the parts of their jobs they enjoy least or find most challenging is tremendously rewarding and creates immediate value for the company.

For example, AI is helping us access data we did not have access to before.  We can automatically gather additional policy data using AI tools and now use it to enhance benchmarking analytics for our clients.

Additionally, nothing is standard in the insurance industry. So, evaluating insurance documents, finding information in the documents and looking for missing information, has been tried many times, but was not really possible before the recent evolution of AI. With current AI capabilities, we are able to use technology to accurately evaluate those documents, extract critical data and evaluate opportunities to improve coverage.

-- Matt Watkins, CIO, IMA Financial Group

In some ways, yes. However, AI tools also offer an opportunity to offload more IT tasks and refocus staff time on these new challenges.

IT leaders are often accountable for AI initiatives by default. According to one of our recent studies, 54% of organizations put AI initiatives under the CIO or CTO. Those leaders are driving measurable impact roughly half the time. That's a respectable hit rate for a capability this new, but it also means the other half of the time the accountability sits with someone who can't yet demonstrate a return.

While IT leaders are struggling to deliver measurable impact, they're also expecting costs to go up.

First, the spend is committed before the evidence is. 96% of respondents expect AI budgets to rise over the next 12 months, and almost half expect increases of more than 25%. Almost no one is forecasting a decrease. CIOs are being asked to defend an accelerating spend on a capability whose returns most organizations cannot yet quantify. Even more reason to create a formal strategy that includes budget allocation. CIOs should avoid being accountable for AI spend, instead partnering with business peers and finding a shared accountability approach.

AI is also making CIOs reconsider their current vendor relationships. 78% expect AI to displace or reduce spending on traditional enterprise software within two years. Of those, almost half say AI will reduce reliance on some tools, and 28% anticipate replacing one or more major platforms outright. CIOs now must weigh whether they'll continue to use a legacy software solution or a new AI-native solution for various capabilities.

-- Brian Jackson, principal research director, Info-Tech Research Group

Tim Murphy is a reporter covering IT strategy for Informa TechTarget, with a focus on IT leadership, governance, workforce skills and AI strategy. His enterprise technology coverage has earned multiple Azbee Awards.