CIOs who spearhead AI adoption and value creation can face an uphill, lonely battle as the rest of the C-suite expects near-term results from the effort. PwC’s April 2026 C-Suite Outlook report found that 81% of executives say that their organizations are “at least a year away from seeing meaningful returns beyond efficiency.” The race to achieve those returns is competitive and CIOs risk losing without confederates in their corner.
The human element remains a significant factor in the potential success of AI, as with other emerging technologies. Other CIOs, C-suite peers and board members can be invaluable resources to figure out what works and what doesn’t on the road to AI value creation.
“It would be irresponsible to not talk to other people about the adoption of this technology,” said Steve Santana, CIO of ETS, an education and talent solutions organization.
Santana and two other CIOs talk about how they are tapping into their personal networks to help shape their approach to AI.
Navigating data governance and security considerations
Applying AI at the enterprise level comes with a lot of big, fundamental questions. Early on in the adoption of AI at DeVry University, CIO Chris Campbell reached out to his network to discuss governance and the data management. Later, the conversation focused on use cases and scale.
“I’ve been in several conversations where we’ve worked through: How do you find measurable impact? How do you scale outcomes?” said Campbell.
For Santana, early conversations with his network gave him the perspective he needed to temper his leadership’s eagerness to leap into AI experimentation. He talked to his peer group about how they took security into consideration when exploring AI and how they were having those discussions with their CEOs and CFOs.
“I could have been rolled over by leadership on how I deployed technology early,” said Santana. “I felt emboldened to put up those walls to make sure that we did it safely, and that’s paid off invaluably.”
When CIOs turn to trusted members of their networks, they can get frank insight into what other organizations are spending on AI, what their implementation timelines look like and the outcomes that they are seeing. CIOs can open these conversations up to peers outside of their enterprises, even to CIOs of competing companies.
Competitors, naturally will not reveal proprietary information to one another, but a significant amount of work enterprises do with AI is broadly applicable.
“I would confirm, yes, we’re doing similar things that you’re chasing down. I would also talk about the impact in general terms,” said Santana.
Of course, CIOs may find they need someone to talk to when drilling into specifics of how AI can improve margins in a use case. Then, it might be time to turn to board members. Eliot Pikoulis, CIO of CFA Institute, a nonprofit that provides education to investment professionals, explained how he had an AI brainstorming session with one of the institute’s board members who also runs an AI center of excellence within a financial services industry solution. Pikoulis presented his agentic strategy to the board member and was able to garner valuable feedback.
Choosing AI services via expert feedback
The sheer amount of AI vendors and tools available in the market is staggering. A CIO alone cannot feasibly sift through and evaluate their options.
“If you talk to the vendors, all you hear is that we’re the best thing that’s ever happened. You need perspective from people who’ve used the products,” Pikoulis said.
In fact, Pikoulis was one of the people Santana reached out to when considering deploying Microsoft Copilot in his organization; the two CIOs previously worked together and remained in touch. “Copilot looked like it was a good opportunity. And I instantly started talking to as many CEOs, CIOs, former CIOs I can get my hands on. One of them was actually at a competitor,” Santana shared. “They had the exact same thought process I had. It’s the easier, safer bet to go with.” That quick feedback gave Santana the confidence to present his leadership with a directive to take action.
Pikoulis also talks with his peers about the plethora of agentic enterprise solutions in the market. He wants the flexibility of using different components with an enterprise layer, rather than going all in with one company.
“It’s great to talk to somebody about Glean. It’s probably the best enterprise agentic solution out there at the moment because it’s got connectors into pretty much all the data sources you want to work with, but it’s a small niche company,” he said. There may be an assumption that big players would dominate this market, and that is where input from other CIOs comes in. “You would assume that the big players are going to eventually take up this market. So, then you start to wonder: Which big player should I be partnering with? Who looks like they’re more likely to come to the fore? And that’s where you want to talk to other CIOs.”
Charting AI’s course
CIOs can lean on one another for the nitty-gritty technical discussions and for the big picture conversations. The latter may start to rise on the networking priority list as CIOs are increasingly expected to become strategic leaders.
While Pikoulis thinks about different vendors and tools, he remains even more focused on the underlying architecture, asking questions like “Who owns the data?”
“The actual architecture and structure of how you do this is, at the moment, way more important than the specific vendors and the quality of the models that they’re using,” he said. “That’s a great discussion to have with somebody.”
Campbell looks toward a future shaped by agentic AI and thinking about how governance will need to adapt to account for the proliferation of agents across entire enterprise ecosystems.
“How are we going to know what they are, what they’re doing and who gives them permissions?” he said. “That is going to be a place I’ll be spending a lot of time with my peer group.”
CIOs are also thinking about what AI means for the future of the human workforce. Will it be a tool that augments workers, or is it going to fuel more and more layoffs? They aren’t going to be the sole decisionmakers for their enterprises’ approach to automation, but they are key stakeholders in those conversations.
“That ethical setup to what you’re doing and why you’re doing it’s a massive discussion that we have within the technology community,” said Pikoulis.
