ORLANDO, Fla. — For CIOs, guiding businesses through rapid technological change is a given. But the swift pace of development in AI releases, capabilities and autonomy often come with risk.
It’s the story of every technology release over the last few decades. Several CIOs at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando this week likened AI’s impact to the dot-com era or the advent of cloud — enabling reinvention of how businesses work, but introducing security and social risks along the way.
Most tech executives are in the midst of balancing those risks with AI’s current measurable and unquantifiable value, Gartner analysts said during the conference's keynote address.
Still, in 2026, risk isn’t stopping AI adoption. Not using AI isn’t an option for enterprises, Prashant Prahlad, SVP of product at Capital One Software, told CIO Dive.
“I think it's one of those things that, if you don't get on board, it's going to be an extinction event,” Prahlad said.
Prahlad and other tech leaders spoke with CIO Dive this week about the concerns they face as they deploy AI throughout their organizations.
Shifting security needs
Before heading a product team, Prahlad had a background in cybersecurity. Prior to the rise of AI for enterprises a few years ago, risk appetite for the technology was fairly low, he said.
But the last few months have made it clear that security and governance must be a part of tech leaders’ game plan, he said. The Hugging Face incident proves that the industry still has a lot to learn about autonomy and access to agentic systems, he said.
"It's an unknown, and as a security person, the instinct is to lock everything down,” Prahlad said. “That's a necessary step, but it does keep me up at night. I don't know where my data is. I don't know what to utilize.”
He warned tech executives against over-securing systems in a way that could be counterproductive. In the long run, high-profile hacking incidents could raise awareness about governance and security, prompting action within companies, he said.
Runaway agents
The pace of change is what’s most concerning to Frank Iannella, the USA CIO and SVP for digital and technology at Heineken.
That fact that “it's not clear who has control over this” is another key concern, Iannella told CIO Dive.
Outside of the technology’s use at the beverage company, which is focused on using data for decision intelligence throughout its marketing, sales and operations, Ianella said he has broader concern about who’s building the systems.
“They're not clear why they're acting the way they're acting,” Iannella said. “That's a little bit worrisome.”
New virtual environments
For Michael Cato, SVP and CIO at Bowdoin College, the risks keeping him up at night about AI changes often, he told CIO Dive.
“My answer today is different than it was a month ago,” he said.
Free AI agents, accessible to the public, are currently causing him the most concern. In the last few weeks, customer-facing AI agents, such as Meta’s Muse personal agent or OpenAI’s Dot, have been widely adopted by non-business users. Cato said he feels as though the companies are handing people a virtual environment and very few security boundaries.
“I'm deeply worried about what people will do, both within our environment — since we're doing the work to figure out how to better protect our environment — but I'm also deeply worried about if someone's going to accidentally wipe out their retirement. And I think it's going to be trivial until it happens.”
Lack of accountability
The lack of accountability inside most organizations concerns Mike Park, CIO at cloud software provider Infor. Despite how widely enterprises use AI, there’s little consensus around clear ownership of the technology.
“AI is moving into core processes faster than companies can decide who is responsible for it and how to effectively govern it,” Park said.
He feels too many organizations lack systems of accountability, which could cause problems when an agent inevitably gets something wrong or overreaches. Identifying the person or group who assumes that responsibility will be critical in 2027 and beyond, he added.
Moving cautiously
In regulated industries like financial services, risk is always top of mind, said Jerry Walker, CIO for the Oregon State Treasury. But AI use in the industry is growing — three-quarters of leaders reported that they are using the technology this year, compared with less than one-third in 2024.
“What keeps me up at night is, are we able to trade every morning at five in the morning?” Walker said. “Are our investors ready to go, and then we have the technology to protect them and to provide for them to run everything?”
Walker said his organization, and many of its peers, are betting “everything” on AI.
Because of risks associated with new technologies, and the responsibilities of the financial services industry, Walker said his team isn’t looking to move the needle as quickly as possible with AI, but rather to take a more cautious approach.
“We do look at it a little differently,” Walker said. “We have to make sure, because with one mistake, with the amount of money we handle, it can shift the market really fast.”
