AI occupied the lion's share of IT leaders' attention in 2025, with tech teams accelerating their adoption of the technology to build smarter chatbots and create loads of code.
The reality check arrived later in 2025: While two-thirds of organizations use generative AI in production, only 15% report a positive impact on earnings, with only one-third of decision-makers linking AI spend to profit and loss, according to a recent Forrester report.
So what’s on tap for 2026?
IT leaders will recalibrate AI efforts while trying to reduce their growing technical debt. They’ll do this by executing more intentional deployments that balance human-machine collaboration while generating repeatable ROI.
CIO Dive spoke with a handful of IT leaders to learn what they're resolving to accomplish in the year ahead.
Julie Averill, founder of consultancy Gold Thread and former EVP and CIO at Lululemon:
“My resolution is to influence leaders to double down on the skills no algorithm can replace: emotional intelligence, cultural fluency and the ability to build psychological safety across global teams.”
Averill explained: “Everyone's rushing to deploy AI in 2026, and I get it — the technology is incredible. But what I see in many organizations is this: They're so focused on artificial intelligence that they're forgetting to invest in the human intelligence that actually drives change. A story as old as time — understand the problem first, then create the solution.”
In an increasingly AI-centric world, some IT leaders might think they have to make a trade-off between IQ and EQ. They don't, but if they do they should choose EQ, Averill insisted. The reason? IT leadership is still about people.
“You can teach someone Python. You can't teach them how to read a room, build trust across cultures, or know when to push and when to listen," she said. “In 2026, those skills are what separate good leaders from great ones.”
Averill also said making room for the messy human stuff is essential.
“Real transformation isn't clean. It's awkward conversations, hard decisions and navigating the fear that comes with change. The organizations that get this right stop trying to make it all look polished and start being honest about the struggle.”
Jay Ferro, EVP, chief information, technology and product officer at Clario:
AI will continue to mature in 2026 as companies begin to figure out their “human-AI operating models.”
“People have pilots, they’ve done their PoCs [proofs of concept], they have agents somewhere and they have copilots,” Ferro said. “There’s a lot less of, ‘what can we automate,’ and a lot more of, ‘what deserves to be automated?’ The focus for us in 2026 is: What deserves our attention?”
To that end, building agents isn’t the hard part; it’s deciding who is responsible when agents go wrong. This is critical for Clario, which is a provider of clinical research technology and operates in a highly regulated sector.
“We want our humans making judgment calls, handling ambiguity and owning accountability,” he said. “We want AI to remove the friction, handling the scale and improving consistency and quality.”
AI aside, Clario will continue to standardize and simplify its IT environment in 2026. The idea is to reduce tool sprawl and digital environments that grew unwieldy during the COVID-19 pandemic as the company leaned into more remote work. “That is a never-ending North Star,” Ferro said.
Doug Saunders, CIO at Arctic Glacier Premium Ice:
To differentiate itself, Arctic Glacier is deploying AI agents that help mitigate order and distribution problems that arise for retail customers looking to refill their coolers with packaged ice. The roll-out is underway and will accelerate in 2026.
“We want to be more reliable and durable in the processes that help us maintain our customer relationships,” Saunders said.
The company is also using Lidar-based IoT devices to help monitor the temperature and quantity of ice in customer stores, enabling the distributor to be more proactive about refilling orders. Using analytics, Arctic Glacier monitors weather models to better anticipate sales needs, ensuring that customers never run out of ice — even on the hottest days.
“We can be proactive around servicing and have more profitable stops,” Saunders said.
Wesley Eugene, senior vice president of North America, HIT Global:
The new year will be about deploying AI and IT projects with peoples’ purposes and goals in mind —consistent with human-centered design principles, according to Eugene. “Every AI initiative needs to start with a real employee, a real customer and have the story of how we are transforming that journey,” he said.
For instance, AI tools that Eugene’s team deployed to automate sales pipelines dehumanized HIT Global’s outreach, proving that “automation isn’t always the right way to go,” he said. “We didn’t have the right balance of the human in the loop.”
“The AI we deploy needs to answer, ‘What’s the clear articulation of how we’re reducing friction?’ Oftentimes, we tend to focus on how we’re getting to that value measurement in terms of dollars. But I need to be more intentional about measuring the human impact,” Eugene added.
On a personal note, Eugene resolves to “unplug more,” affording himself more time to think and to let creativity flourish. “It’s about designing those moments of disconnection so I can recharge.”
Bryan O’Sullivan, CTO at Voxel:
Reducing technical debt while continuing to innovate is a top priority for O’Sullivan next year. The chief culprit? Cutting corners and failing to clean up extraneous code generated by high velocity programming. This can create hidden complexity that compounds risk down the line.
“In a startup that is growing rapidly, it’s easy to lose sight of something that slows you down,” he said. “It’s about giving people room to improve on the environment that they work in.”
It’s a delicate dance; even as his teams deliver on deadlines, they can also get caught in a vicious cycle where the time they leave to “deal with the mess evaporates with the next deadline around the corner,” O’Sullivan said.
