Dive Brief:
- As businesses pursue widescale AI implementation, the wave of change has hit the CIO office, with nearly two-thirds of executives saying the technology has redefined their roles, according to a report from Atera published last month. The IT management vendor surveyed 1,000 CIOs and VPs of IT for the report.
- Almost half of CIOs say their responsibility over business value has increased in the wake of AI deployments. More than 2 in 5 execs say they're more frequently tasked with enabling collaboration between humans and AI.
- Despite the expansion in purview, CIOs report that execution is difficult. More than two-thirds of tech chiefs describe the management of cross-functional initiatives alongside core operations maintenance as moderate or extremely challenging.
Dive Insight:
CIO popularity in the C-suite spiked amid promises of AI-fueled productivity gains. Agentic implementations stoked the fire, escalating questions about governance and data readiness for CIOs.
Most tech chiefs also report feeling more confident in their roles compared with last year amid the heightened importance of AI implementations, a Salesforce study published last month found. Nearly all CIOs said they know more about AI than they did last year.
“The data is clear: AI agents have unlocked an entirely new reality, one where they are capable of anticipating, learning, and taking actions autonomously,” said Atera CEO Gil Pekelman in a press release accompanying the study. “The CIO mandate is now to lead enterprise IT with AI — driving measurable business value across the organization.”
But the path toward a fully AI-driven IT department remains a work in progress for most businesses.
Just 15% of IT application leaders say their companies are piloting, deploying or even considering fully autonomous AI agents that don't depend on human oversight, according to Gartner research published in September. CIOs are still giving serious consideration to the technology, as 75% pilot some form of agentic AI.
As demand for automated IT operations grows, vendors are stepping up their services. AWS unveiled an agentic AI platform called AWS Transform earlier this year that aims to help businesses automate the modernization of legacy workloads. Microsoft expanded Copilot Studio last month so that enterprises can build more advanced agents and access more data sources.
