CIO Shelley Seewald is overseeing a lead-too-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 res
“The deliverable isn’t a project plan,” Gallagher said. “It’s proof that the business runs faster, safer and more cost-disciplined as 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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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.”
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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.”
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.
CIOs Delegate Responsibilities to Focus on Strategy
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are increasingly relinquishing direct control over certain technology functions to empower business units and concentrate on more strategic leadership roles.This shift involves letting go of tasks that don’t substantially differentiate the organization and streamlining approval processes.
“CIOs shoudl stop being the default owner for everything ‘technology-adjacent,'” said Gartner analyst Daniel Gallagher. He emphasized the need to shed low-differentiation work and approval bottlenecks.
According to Gartner’s Linh Hoang, cios are intentionally transferring ownership of specific platforms and tools to business units, while maintaining enterprise-level controls for data, identity, and security.
“It’s a shift from control to collaboration,” Hoang stated. “CIOs build the rails, but business leaders drive the train.”
This trend reflects a broader change in the CIO role, moving from direct management of all technology to establishing frameworks and enabling business units to innovate within defined boundaries. CIOs remain accountable for overall outcomes,even as ownership of specific tools and platforms is distributed.
