The CIO’s Path To Value

Traditionally, CIOs were tasked with maintaining IT infrastructure, but as AI adoption accelerates, leaders are under increased pressure to drive innovation and connect technology to real business outcomes.

“I think the CIO role is becoming very, very challenging, and it has been becoming harder every day,” Zehren told me during a media panel at Info-Tech LIVE in Las Vegas. “So if we look at our member base, and that is across the entire industry, there is so many transitions of decision makers, of IT leaders, right now, and why is that happening? Because there is this demand from the board and from the CEO,” Zehren said.

During the panel, Joel McLean, the founder and chairman of Info-Tech Research Group, also agreed that the CIO role is going to get “way harder.” “For the CIO, AI is going to increase throughput. It’s going to increase, let’s call it independent people wanting to use AI," McLean said. “The CIO is going to be stuck with increasing levels of shadow AI and shadow IT that just grow and grow."

Being able to connect adoption with value has become an essential part of the role. In his keynote speech on day one of the event, McLean announced that Info-Tech Research Group would be launching the CIO Analytics Platform in beta, a new data, BI, AI and advisory platform that combines operational IT data with Info-Tech research, diagnostics, benchmarking, AI capabilities and analyst expertise to deliver actionable recommendations and measurable outcomes.

Across the industry, there is broad recognition that the CIO not only needs to maintain the visibility over tools to drive IT strategy, but also needs to tie agentic adoption to value at scale. All the while, operational constraints like legacy technology, employee knowledge, creativity, budgets and tokens threaten to slow progress.

Security And Shadow AI

Besides the pressure to innovate, CIOs are also faced with keeping their organizations secure in an ever-more challenging threat landscape. Just as advances in frontier AI models like Mythos threaten to accelerate vulnerability disclosure, teams across organizations are deploying tools faster than IT departments can keep up with, presenting new entry points for threat actors to exploit.

For instance, an IBM survey of 2,000 C-level technology executives found that 70% of technology leaders say teams across the business are deploying technology faster than IT can track. At the same time, 59% also cite security and compliance concerns as top barriers to scaling AI agents. These pressures, among others, have created an environment in which only 11% of CIOs and CTOs say they are fully ready for the next wave of AI agent deployment.

Timothy Galluzi, CIO for the State of Nevada and speaker at Info-Tech LIVE 2026, told me during an interview at the event that technology has become intertwined with everything the State’s business units are doing, and describes his position as a CIO as being a mix of a 'strategic advisor,” “business leader” and “chief problem solver for the state.”

“Technology has to be at the table to have those conversations about what is possible. How do you solve these big problems that government faces every day? How do you do more with less every single year? And technology is often the answer for that,” Galluzi said.

In his four-plus years as State CIO, Galluzi has experienced the challenging cyber threat landscape firsthand. Just last year, he experienced what he described as a “pretty significant cybersecurity incident.” During the breach, a state employee downloaded malware from a spoofed website, exposing critical state systems, which an attacker exploited to delete backups and deploy ransomware.

In response, the State of Nevada’s Governor’s Technology Office and the Office of the CIO under Galluzi coordinated remediation of the breach across more than 60 state agencies, six critical vendors and eight supporting vendors. The effort was a success, with the state recovering 90% of the data and restoring operations in 28 days without paying a ransom. The remaining 10% of data remained in control of the State but wasn’t required for service restoration and remains continuously monitored.

Such incidents highlight that CIOs are not only forced to streamline innovation, but also cybersecurity and incident response. It is an unforgiving, high stakes role, and as more ungoverned AI tools proliferate across enterprise environments, it’s only going to become more difficult.

Despite cybersecurity remaining “top of mind” for Galluzi, he shared that the organization recently launched Microsoft Copilot across the entire executive branch to provide employees with access to generative AI tools (and is currently working on its overall governance plan to gain more visibility on the tools in use). The approach attempts to balance a need to adopt at pace in a security-conscious way.

“I think shadow AI is definitely a concern for me and you know one of the easiest ways to mitigate that is to provide good solid tools,” Galluzi said. “And if we as leaders don’t provide those tools for them with appropriate governance, appropriate guardrails, they’re going to go out and find their own.”

Driving Business Outcomes

As AI tools proliferate across the enterprise, CIOs need to provide the guidance and infrastructure necessary to support agentic adoption and drive business results. At a minimum, agentic pilots need to be developed in a scalable and cost-efficient way, as failure to do so can lead to overspending, as was the case with Uber, which blew through its entire AI budget in just four months.

“The role of the CIO has shifted from managing technology to driving business outcomes. Today, the most effective CIOs are business leaders first, using AI, data and digital capabilities to accelerate growth, improve decision-making and create better experiences for consumers, partners and employees,” Seth Cohen, CIO for Procter & Gamble, told me via email.

“The job is no longer defined by what technology an organization builds, but by how effectively those capabilities are adopted and scaled across the enterprise. In an AI-driven world, the CIO’s role is to connect process, technology, and people, and turn that into real business value,” Cohen said.

Angela Yochem, global chief information and technology officer at Krispy Kreme, also agreed the CIO had a critical role to play in driving growth. “Technology has become a primary driver of competitive advantage, making the CIO one of the most critical roles in any organization. The role has evolved far beyond overseeing IT operations; today’s CIO is also a business strategist, innovation catalyst and growth enabler,” Yochem said.

Cohen and Yochem’s comments echo sentiments felt across the industry. For instance, Foundry’s 25th annual State of the CIO report surveyed 662 heads of IT and 249 line of business respondents and found that 83% of CIOs agree that the CIO is becoming a changemaker, increasingly leading business and technology initiatives.

Today, understanding how employees interact with processes and technologies is critical for effectively deploying agents. Without that knowledge, leaders will encounter increased friction when navigating the transition from legacy systems to tools that can be continuously improved by AI agents.

Speed Kills

Alongside the need to drive business value, there’s also the need to move fast. The problem is that most leaders simply don’t have the visibility needed to make decisions at pace. In fact, 93% of CIOs say their organizations can’t make fast, informed decisions due to issues ranging from fragmented systems to a lack of visibility and real-time trustworthy data.

“We’re asking CIOs to operate in a fundamentally different environment than the one many of us grew up in. For most of my career, technology leaders had the benefit of time. If a new risk emerged, there was usually an opportunity to assess it, build a plan and work through implementation. Much of the way that we operate today was built around that reality,” Claire Bailey, public sector CIO at autonomous AI company Tanium, told me via email.

“Because of AI, those timelines are now compressing. Risks that might have gone unnoticed for months are being identified almost immediately. The question isn’t whether we have enough information, in many cases we already know where the problems are. The question is whether we can act before circumstances change again,” Bailey said.

Bailey says that AI is exposing gaps that organizations didn’t know existed, and while yesterday’s “CIO vocabulary” centered on automating tasks and workflows, today's CIOs must think in terms of autonomy. In practice, that means migrating IT functions to autonomous, fundamentally invisible operation, a shift that CIOs must enable safely and securely.

The transition from legacy systems and workflows to the agentic enterprise will not be easy. The reality is that the CIO will bear the brunt of responsibility for leading the charge to gain value from AI. Those that fail to innovate fast enough won’t just face increased scrutiny but risk outright replacement. It’s an unforgiving landscape, but leaders that double down on connecting adoption to value still have an opportunity to thrive.