CIO Shelley Seewald is overseeing a lead-to-cash initiative at her company, Tungsten Automation. It’s a project traditionally led by a chief revenue officer or COO.
Increasingly, however, work like this is falling to CIOs like Seewald, as these enterprise IT leaders find themselves uniquely positioned to combine business acumen with technical expertise.
“I’m able to look at how to use tech to enable the business — where is AI a good fit, and where we need process change,” Seewald said.
The idea of a CIO leading a lead-to-cash initiative would have been unthinkable a decade ago — even a few years ago — Seewald acknowledged. Today, she said, it’s a sign of what’s ahead for CIOs everywhere.
“It’s evidence of the continuing evolution of the CIO, she added. “I think it’s the role of the future.”
The CIO’s days as back-office custodian of IT are long gone, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the role is settled. Indeed, Seewald and others see plenty of changes still underway.
In 2026, the CIO’s role in shaping how the business operates and performs is still expanding. It reflects a nuanced change in expectations, according to longtime CIOs, analysts and IT advisors — and one that is showing up in many ways as CIOs become more directly involved in nailing down competitive advantage and strategic success across their organizations.
“CIOs are showing how much of an impact they have in their companies,” said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, visiting lecturer and research affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Amar Aswatha, senior vice president of global business engineering, CGI
The remit gets bigger for CIOs in 2026
To be clear, the CIO role — now nearing its 50th anniversary — still retains its original core raison d’etre: enabling the organization’s mission through effective use of technology.
“At a foundational level, the CIO role in 2026 hasn’t fundamentally changed,” said Marc Tanowitz, a managing partner at West Monroe, a business and technology consulting firm. “CIOs still operate across core technology domains — applications, infrastructure, security and architectural standards — and across the three primary phases of the IT lifecycle: plan, build and run.”
But Tanowitz and others also stressed that much has changed beyond that core responsibility, as CIOs take on more duties in business and technology environments that are constantly in flux.
“While these core responsibilities remain the same, the environment in which CIOs operate has become far more complex,” Tanowitz added.
Conal Gallagher, CIO and CISO at Flexera, said the CIO in 2026 is now “accountable for outcomes: trusted data, controlled spend, managed risk and measurable productivity.
“The deliverable isn’t a project plan,” Gallagher said. “It’s proof that the business runs faster, safer and more cost-disciplined because of the operating model IT enables.”
He added that the role is now “tightly coupled to security and governance.
“With AI and SaaS now everywhere, you can’t realistically separate ‘IT decisions’ from data, privacy and cyber risk decisions,” Gallagher said.
Ha Hoang, CIO at Commvault, said the CIO role in 2026 centers on three deliverables:
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Business alignment, “ensuring every digital investment drives measurable outcomes.”
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Data integrity and trust, “protecting and governing the enterprise’s most valuable asset.”
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AI enablement, “helping the organization use AI responsibly, safely and at scale.”
In 2026, the CIO role is less about being the technology owner and more about being a business integrator, Hoang said. At Commvault, that shift places greater emphasis on governance and orchestration across ecosystems.
“We’re operating in a multicloud, multivendor, AI-infused environment,” she said. “A big part of my job is building guardrails and partnerships that enable others to move fast — safely,” she said. “I spend as much time influencing behavior across the enterprise as I do managing technology.”
Mike Anderson, chief digital and information officer at Netskope, had a similar take.
“In 2026 the CIO role is about orchestrating technology in a way that enables speed without increasing risk,” he said. “CIOs are accountable for governance, trust and outcomes — not just deployment. … The CIO is no longer evaluated on systems delivered, but on how effectively technology improves productivity, resilience and decision-making.”
Amar Aswatha, senior vice president of global business engineering at IT consultancy CGI, said CIOs are also responsible for moving their organization’s AI initiatives from experimentation — which dominated 2025 — to execution, the mandate for 2026. That includes deciding which AI pilots are worth scaling to generate real returns.
“There is a constant requirement for CIOs to prove the value,” Aswatha added.
More responsibilities for CIOs — and more friction
The addition of responsibilities isn’t the only change CIOs face. Longstanding challenges, combined with new pressures, are making the job harder than ever.
Analysts at tech research firm Gartner call them “exacerbations,” recognizing that the CIO job has always been complex but continues to accumulate new layers of difficulty.
Christie Struckman, a distinguished vice president analyst at Gartner, identified three primary exacerbations that add more complexity to the CIO role in 2026.
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Rapidly changing organizational strategies. “Corporate strategy isn’t stagnant,” Struckman said. Technology, markets and business conditions all change too much and too fast today for organizations to follow a rigid strategy. “Now it has to be so much more dynamic, so CIOs must make sure technology can move with a changing strategy.”
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Vendor and ecosystem management.CIOs are working to avoid vendor lock-in as AI capabilities evolve, vendor mergers accelerate, data sovereignty concerns intensify, Struckman said.
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Workforce readiness for AI.CIOs are increasingly “held accountable for the readiness of the company workforce to be able to utilize AI so the organization can get value from its AI investments,” Struckman said — a responsibility that requires a closer partnership with HR professionals.
AI adds yet another layer of complexity to the CIO job in 2026.
“The pressure to deliver the benefits of AI investments while ensuring security, compliance and data protection” will be more pronounced this year, Tanowitz said. “The hardest part of the CIO role in 2026 is balancing the business demand to move fast on AI with the need to maintain enterprise control,” he added.
Data quality — critical for AI and automation — is also becoming more difficult to manager, he said.
“Data quality is only partially a technology problem. While CIOs can enforce system-level standards and controls, true data quality depends on business processes, ownership and ongoing discipline across the organization,” he explained.
Andrea Schulze Dias, CIO, Toshiba America Inc.
CIOs: Biggest challenges in 2026
CIOs agree that AI represents a huge challenge — particularly around ROI, governance and mounting pressure to not get it wrong.
Andrea Schulze Dias, CIO at Toshiba America Inc., said pressure is mounting to deliver returns on AI quickly, as time-to-value is being shortened across nearly all organizations.
CGI’s Aswatha added that his firm’s survey of IT leaders found that CIOs struggle to manage expectations around AI capabilities, returns and the sprawl of AI experimentation.
Gallagher pointed to AI governance as a growing challenge. “AI governance has gotten harder because adoption is fast and mostly bottom-up,” he said.
Data readiness is getting harder, he added, because “AI exposes what we used to tolerate — stale, conflicting and obsolete data.”
Cost control is tougher for CIOs in 2026 as well. “SaaS and cloud spend are distributed across teams and duplication is easy,” Gallagher said.
Meanwhile, Commvault’s Hoang said the hardest part of the job is keeping pace with change while maintaining trust and compliance. “AI has accelerated everything from new tools, new risks, new expectations,” she said.
Netskope’s Anderson agreed, noting that rapid innovations often outpaces organizational clarity.
“AI raises expectations around speed and innovation,” Anderson said, “but it also raises the cost of getting things wrong.”
Netskope’s own recent research underscores that challenge: 31% of CIOs said they aren’t confident they understand what their CEOs really want, and 34% don’t feel empowered to make long-term strategic calls.
What’s getting easier?
Some parts of the CIO role are becoming more commoditized — not necessarily easier, per se, but more routine.
Keep-the-lights-on work, for example, has eased, as SaaS, cloud services, AI capabilities and automation, as well as outsourcing pieces to service providers, take hold.
“The run-the-business part of IT is getting easier,” Seewald said. “That’s starting to give us a bit of breathing room.”
Schulze Dias said CIOs often now spend more time managing service providers to ensure that service-level agreements and KPIs are met.
Hoang added that this shift “is freeing CIOs to spend more time on strategy, experience and innovation, the parts of the role that truly differentiate the organization.”
CIOs are also letting go of some responsibilities as they become more strategic leaders.
“CIOs should stop being the default owner for everything ‘technology-adjacent,” Gallagher said. “That means letting go of low-differentiation work and approval bottlenecks.
Hoang said CIOs are deliberately giving up direct ownership of certain platforms and tools to empower business units — within enterprise guardrails for data, identity and security.
“It’s a shift from control to collaboration,” she said. “CIOs build the rails, but business leaders drive the train.”
Accountability vs. ownership
This year, CIOs also face continuing challenges in areas where they are accountable for outcomes but do not own or control the underlying initiative, processes or products.
AI is the clearest example.
“Business teams often drive adoption and sometimes procurement,” Gallagher said, “but IT and security is still held accountable for data exposure, compliance and integration.”
Cloud and SaaS spend pose similar challenges.
“Teams consume, vendors multiply and the CIO is asked to ‘optimize’ without shared governance,” Gallagher said. “The fix is to make ownership explicit through decision rights, shared KPIs and joint accountability with finance, procurement, security and business leaders.”
CIOs also no longer — nor should they — own every technology decision.
“In an AI-enabled organization, innovation is happening across every function, not just IT,” Anderson said. “The CIO’s role is to set the guardrails around data, security and governance, then empower teams to move quickly within them. Centralized control doesn’t scale when AI is embedded into everyday work.”
Other areas where CIOs have accountability but not ownership include workforce AI readiness and value realization from technology investments.
These dynamics are reshaping the CIO role.
CIOs aren’t stopping ownership, Tanowitz said. “They are competing differently for attention within the executive office. They’re no longer the only technology voice in the room. Other executives, including chief AI officers and business leaders focused on technology-enabled growth, are shaping the agenda. That dynamic is forcing CIOs to be sharper, more collaborative and more strategic in how they influence outcomes,” he said.
