Tech innovation is accelerating faster than ever, particularly in AI. Many CIOs, under pressure to accelerate digital transformation, have learned to avoid chasing the latest models, recognizing that constant adoption can be counterproductive. At the same time, they’re grappling with unprecedented tech stack complexity — a challenge that continues to generate a mountain of technical debt.
While some tool providers, such as low-code vendors, claim their offerings solve the problem, the reality remains that today’s breakthrough tech inevitably becomes tomorrow’s legacy system.
“We’re living through a moment where the pace of technological change has shifted into overdrive,” said Bill Briggs, CTO and principal at Deloitte. “It’s not just fast, it’s exponential, and businesses know they can’t afford to be spectators.”
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Bill Briggs, CTO, Deloitte
What makes this period so challenging is that AI isn’t just another addition to the toolbox, Briggs said — it’s reshaping the entire workshop. The real risk, he added, is trying to build advanced capabilities on yesterday’s infrastructure. “It’s like trying to stream 4K video on dial-up,” he added. “You need the right foundation, or you’re setting yourself up for frustration.
Why Technical Debt Has Become CIOs’ Biggest Innovation Roadblock
As organizations rush to adopt AI, technical debt has emerged as the top barrier to progress.
“Leaders get seduced by shiny new AI capabilities without realizing their current systems are held together with digital duct tape and crossed fingers,” Briggs said. “Technical debt isn’t just an IT problem — it’s an innovation roadblock.”
Briggs pointed to Deloitte data showing 70% of technology leaders cite technical debt as their number one productivity drain. His advice? Take inventory before you innovate. “Know what’s working versus what’s just barely hanging on, because adding AI to broken processes doesn’t fix them, it just breaks them faster,” he said.
Industry AI hype makes the challenge worse. A constant stream of information — and misinformation — creates unrealistic expectations among IT and business leaders alike.
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Chris Steel, CTO, i-GENTIC AI
Chris Steel, CTO and co-founder of agentic AI governance and compliance solution provider i-GENTIC AI, warned that “throwing in AI copilots or shiny SaaS or PaaS apps without thinking about governance and ROI is a trap.”
He added that “rip and replace” strategies are expensive and slow. Instead, Steel advised taking a modular incremental approach to the stack direction that aligns with IT and business objectives. “Decisions about stack direction can’t sit with IT alone,” he said. “You need CIOs, CISOs, data leaders, compliance and even lines of business. If you miss any one of them the stack fails in the real world.”
How IT Organizational Structure Affects Innovation and Technical Debt
Organizational structure also affects how well companies balance innovation with maintaining legacy systems, said Anthony Caiafa, CTO at services and software provider SS&C Technologies.
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Anthony Caiafa, CTO, SS&C Technologies
“Everything kind of boils down to how the organizations are structured, how your teams are structured, what the goals are per team and what you’re delivering,” Caiafa said.
At SS&C, some teams focus solely on maintaining legacy systems, while others support the integration of newer technologies. But, Caiafa said, the dual structure doesn’t eliminate the challenge: Technical debt still accumulates as newer technologies are adopted.
He advised CIOs to stay disciplined about prioritizing value. At SS&C, the approach is straightforward: “If it’s not going to help us or make a material impact on what we’re doing day to day, then it’s not going to be an area of focus,” he said.
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Dom Profico, CTO, Bridgenext
Strategic misalignment between IT and the business is another major obstacle, said Dom Profico, CTO at global digital consultancy Bridgenext. He has found that IT teams often chase innovation without a clear linkage to business outcomes.
“Technical debt isn’t just legacy code — it’s the accumulation of decisions made without long-term clarity,” he said. Profico urged CIOs to embed architectural thinking into every IT initiative, align with business strategy and adopt of new technologies in an incremental manner — while avoiding “the urge to over-index on shiny tools.”
Terry Stahler, CIO and chief customer officer at Corevisit, an SAP partner that provides B2B customer portals and e-commerce platforms to manufacturers,
agreed that alignment starts at the top.
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Terry Stahler, CIO, Corevisit
“It’s not about running a back-office organization. It’s about a business-facing collaborative organization across the C-suite,” Stahler said. Savvy CIOs get clear top-down buy-in while managing massive digital transformation. He pointed to one CIO he talked to recently who initiated a series of strategy meetings with the business on different topical areas. “One of these areas is AI, where they’re coming together to discuss the technology aspects and where the business could get value from these various emerging technologies,” he said.
Finding the Right Balance Between Innovation and Stability
CIOs today walk a constant tightrope between staying current and avoiding costly overhauls. Few organizations have the luxury of rearchitecting their tech stacks every time a new technology comes down the pike. But ignoring innovation risks falling behind or worse, becoming obsolete.
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Jason Birmingham, CTO, Broadridge
“You’ve got two forces pulling in opposite directions,” said Jason Birmingham, chief technology officer and head of global engineering at global fintech company Broadridge. How do unencumber yourself from past approaches to take advantage of emerging capabilities and still provide ongoing business value?
“That’s the thing that gets CIOs in trouble,” he explained. “They can’t get the right roadmap set up with their respective business partners, where you’re still creating value along the way.”
At Broadridge, aligning with the business partners required a “behavioral shift,” Birmingham said.
“Over the last five or six years, we had a bunch of people doing tech for tech, and it was great engineering, but it made no difference to the business,” he said.
Now, every initiative must be tied directly to a meaningful business outcome. “If we can’t tie [a new technology] back to a business outcome that matters, we really need to question why we’re doing it,” he said.
Speak Business, Not Geek
Finally, Stahler said some CIOs make the age-old mistake of talking to non-technical people about tech in technical terms. What makes sense inside IT doesn’t resonate outside it.
“One company I worked at had a series of presentations in the Q2 cycle. First, we would have a series of presentations by the presidents and GMs, then later in the cycle, functional leaders gave their presentations. The idea was, did you hear what the GMs and presidents said?” he said. That structure forced the functional leaders to focus on business value.
Deloitte’s Briggs recommended that IT leaders stop thinking like trusted operators and start acting like change instigators.
“Be the person who sees around corners, who connects dots others miss. Your deep technical chops are your superpower, but business fluency is your cape,” he said.
