IT has never been an easy job for CIOs and their teams. There’s the day-to-day reality of running the business, keeping systems available, managing risk, supporting customers, and delivering new capabilities. At the same time, CIOs are expected to keep pace with both the evolution of existing technologies and the steady stream of new ones entering the market. Some of the toughest challenges aren’t technical. They come from friction across roles, overlap, turf, and unclear ownership across IT and the business.

AI accelerates both progress and pressure

AI can help on the technology front. It can accelerate development, improve productivity, and make it easier to keep up with change. But it’s also introducing a new set of challenges — ones that can quickly turn into operational issues if CIOs don’t get ahead of them. Most CIOs are already feeling pressure from multiple directions. Boards and executive teams have invested heavily in AI and expect results. Business units are under the same pressure — and they don’t always wait for IT. Sometimes they partner. Other times, they move ahead on their own. That dynamic isn’t new. What’s changing is how easy it has become for the business to build technology without IT.

From IT-led development to business-led build

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal noted that OpenAI is working with firms like Accenture, Capgemini, and PwC to expand adoption of its AI coding tool, Codex — which generates and updates code from plain-English prompts — across enterprises, with millions of weekly active users and growing enterprise uptake. OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser was quoted as saying that OpenAI’s consulting partners will help bring Codex “into every single line of business.”

Tools like Codex allow users to generate and update code using natural language. But that framing understates what’s really happening. These tools can be used to build applications, automate workflows, and create AI-driven agents that execute tasks across the business. Adoption is moving quickly. Finance teams can build finance applications. Sales teams can build sales tools. Increasingly, they’re doing it using plain-English prompts.

How boundaries blur

For CIOs, the challenge isn’t the technology; it’s the breakdown of traditional boundaries. Business units have often stepped in when they felt IT couldn’t move fast enough. Most CIOs have heard some version of: “I’m trying to run a business here. Either get it done or get out of the way.” What’s different now is that the barrier to entry is gone. With tools like Codex, and the support of external partners, business units don’t just have ideas. They can build and deploy. That’s where turf skirmishes emerge.

Development is no longer confined to IT. It’s happening across marketing, finance, and operations — anywhere there’s a problem to solve and the motivation to act. Without clear alignment within the organization, that quickly turns into overlapping solutions, duplicated effort, and ambiguous responsibilities.

Left unmanaged, this leads to familiar issues: fragmented architectures, integration challenges, security gaps, and increased operational risk. IDC’s 2025 assessment of low-code and no-code developer technologies confirms this shift is already underway at scale. But handled well, it can unlock a level of innovation most organizations struggle to achieve through centralized IT alone.

What CIOs should do next

The CIOs who get ahead of this won’t try to shut it down. They’ll get in front of it and shape it. In IDC’s conversations with enterprise CIOs, this is one of the most common inflection points we’re tracking right now. A few practical steps can make a meaningful difference.

Build fluency inside IT

Your teams need to understand tools like Codex well enough to guide the organization. That may mean partnering with firms like Accenture or PwC to accelerate the learning curve. The objective is straightforward: be the team the business turns to — not the one it works around.

Enable fast experimentation — but define the path to scale

Business units should be able to prototype quickly. In many cases, they’re closer to the problem and can move faster. But prototypes need a clear path into production. IT’s role is to take what works and integrate it, secure it, and operationalize it so it can scale across the enterprise.

Define roles early, before they get defined for you

If you don’t establish clear roles across IT and the business, they will emerge on their own — and usually through friction. Align early on:

Who builds demos and proofs of concept versus test and production

Who owns ideation versus scaling out and running

How solutions move from idea to production

Without that clarity, turf issues don’t go away — they grow.

Balancing speed and control

This isn’t just about Codex. It’s about what happens when the ability to build technology moves beyond IT. The CIOs who succeed won’t focus solely on control. They’ll focus on enablement — creating the conditions for the business to move faster while ensuring the right guardrails are in place. That balance — between speed and structure, autonomy and accountability — will determine how effectively organizations turn AI investment into real business outcomes.

Gerald Johnston - Adjunct Research Advisor

Jerry Johnston, an adjunct research advisor with IDC’s IT Executive Programs (IEP), founded GJ Technology Consulting, LLC, where he assisted global financial institutions and helped launch a UK startup bank. Johnston is an experienced financial services and consulting executive who…