A CIO’s wish list is typically long and costly. Fortunately, by establishing reasonable priorities, it’s possible to keep pace with emerging demands without draining your team or budget.
As 2026 arrives, CIOs need to take a step back and consider how they can use technology to help reinvent their wider business while running their IT capabilities with a profit and loss mindset, advises Koenraad Schelfaut, technology strategy and advisory global lead at business advisory firm Accenture. “The focus should shift from ‘keeping the lights on’ at the lowest cost to using technology … to drive topline growth, create new digital products, and bring new business models faster to market.”
Here’s an overview of what should be at the top of your 2026 priorities list.
1. Strengthening cybersecurity resilience and data privacy
Enterprises are increasingly integrating generative and agentic AI deep into their business workflows, spanning all critical customer interactions and transactions, says Yogesh Joshi, senior vice president of global product platforms at consumer credit reporting firm TransUnion. “As a result, CIOs and CISOs must expect bad actors will use these same AI technologies to disrupt these workflows to compromise intellectual property, including customer sensitive data and competitively differentiated information and assets.”
Cybersecurity resilience and data privacy must be top priorities in 2026, Joshi says. He believes that as enterprises accelerate their digital transformation and increasingly integrate AI, the risk landscape will expand dramatically. “Protecting sensitive data and ensuring compliance with global regulations is non-negotiable,” Joshi states.
2. Consolidating security tools
CIOs should prioritize re-baselining their foundations to capitalize on the promise of AI, says Arun Perinkolam, Deloitte’s US cyber platforms and technology, media, and telecommunications industry leader. “One of the prerequisites is consolidating fragmented security tools into unified, integrated, cyber technology platforms — also known as platformization.”
Perinkolam says a consolidation shift will move security from a patchwork of isolated solutions to an agile, extensible foundation fit for rapid innovation and scalable AI-driven operations. “As cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated, and the technology landscape evolves, integrating cybersecurity solutions into unified platforms will be crucial,” he says.
“Enterprises now face a growing array of threats, resulting in a sprawling set of tools to manage them,” Perinkolam notes. “As adversaries exploit fractured security postures, delaying platformization only amplifies these risks.”
3. Ensuring data protection
To take advantage of enhanced efficiency, speed, and innovation, organizations of all types and sizes are now racing to adopt new AI models, says Parker Pearson, chief strategy officer at data privacy and preservation firm Donoma Software.
“Unfortunately, many organizations are failing to take the basic steps necessary to protect their sensitive data before unleashing new AI technologies that could potentially be left exposed,” she warns, adding that in 2026 “data privacy should be viewed as an urgent priority.”
Implementing new AI models can raise significant concerns around how data is collected, used, and protected, Pearson notes. These issues arise across the entire AI lifecycle, from how the data used for initial training to ongoing interactions with the model. “Until now, the choices for most enterprises are between two bad options: either ignore AI and face the consequences in an increasingly competitive marketplace; or implement an LLM that could potentially expose sensitive data,” she says. Both options, she adds, can result in an enormous amount of damage.
The question for CIOs is not whether to implement AI, but how to derive optimal value from AI without placing sensitive data at risk, Pearson says. “Many CIOs confidently report that their organization’s data is either ‘fully’ or ‘end to end’ encrypted.” Yet Pearson believes that true data protection requires continuous encryption that keeps information secure during all states, including when it’s being used. “Until organizations address this fundamental gap, they will continue to be blindsided by breaches that bypass all their traditional security measures.”
Organizations that implement privacy-enhancing technology today will have a distinct advantage in implementing future AI models, Pearson says. “Their data will be structured and secured correctly, and their AI training will be more efficient right from the start, rather than continually incurring the expense, and risk of retraining their models.”
4. Focusing on team identity and experience
A top priority for CIOs in 2026 should be resetting their enterprise identity and employee experience, says Michael Wetzel, CIO at IT security software company Netwrix. “Identity is the foundation of how people show up, collaborate, and contribute,” he states. “When you get identity and experience right, everything else, including security, productivity, and adoption, follows naturally.”
Employees expect a consumer-grade experience at work, Wetzel says. “If your internal technology is clunky, they simply won’t use it.” When people work around IT, the organization loses both security and speed, he warns. “Enterprises that build a seamless, identity-rooted experience will innovate faster while organizations that don’t will fall behind.”
5. Navigating increasingly costly ERP migrations
Effectively navigating costly ERP migrations should be at the top of the CIO agenda in 2026, says Barrett Schiwitz, CIO at invoice lifecycle management software firm Basware. “SAP S/4HANA migrations, for instance, are complex and often take longer than planned, leading to rising costs.” He notes that upgrades can cost enterprises upwards of $100 million, rising to as much as $500 million depending on the ERP’s size and complexity.
The problem is that while ERPs try to do everything, they rarely perform specific tasks, such as invoice processing, really well, Schiwitz says. “Many businesses overcomplicate their ERP systems, customizing them with lots of add-ons that further increase risk.” The answer, he suggests, is adopting a “clean core” strategy that lets SAP do what it does best and then supplement it with best-in-class tools to drive additional value.
6. Doubling-down on innovation — and data governance
One of the most important priorities for CIOs in 2026 is architecting a foundation that makes innovation scalable, sustainable, and secure, says Stephen Franchetti, CIO at compliance platform provider Samsara.
Franchetti says he’s currently building a loosely coupled, API-first architecture that’s designed to be modular, composable, and extensible. “This allows us to move faster, adapt to change more easily, and avoid vendor or platform lock-in.” Franchetti adds that in an era where workflows, tools, and even AI agents are increasingly dynamic, a tightly bound stack simply won’t scale.
Franchetti is also continuing to evolve his enterprise data strategy. “For us, data is a long-term strategic asset — not just for AI, but also for business insight, regulatory readiness, and customer trust,” he says. “This means doubling down on data quality, lineage, governance, and accessibility across all functions.”
7. Facilitating workforce transformation
CIOs must prioritize workforce transformation in 2026, says Scott Thompson, a partner in executive search and management consulting company Heidrick & Struggles. “Upskilling and reskilling teams will help develop the next generation of leaders,” he predicts. “The technology leader of 2026 needs to be a product-centric tech leader, ensuring that product, technology, and the business are all one and the same.”
CIOs can’t hire their way out of the talent gap, so they must build talent internally, not simply buy it on the market, Thompson says. “The most effective strategy is creating a digital talent factory with structured skills taxonomies, role-based learning paths, and hands-on project rotations.”
Thompson also believes that CIOs should redesign job roles for an AI-enabled environment and use automation to reduce the amount of specialized labor required. “Forming fusion teams will help spread scarce expertise across the organization, while strong career mobility and a modern engineering culture will improve retention,” he states. “Together, these approaches will let CIOs grow, multiply, and retain the talent they need at scale.”
8. Improving team communication
A CIO’s top priority should be developing sophisticated and nuanced approaches to communication, says James Stanger, chief technology evangelist at IT certification firm CompTIA. “The primary effect of uncertainty in tech departments is anxiety,” he observes. “Anxiety takes different forms, depending upon the individual worker.”
Stanger suggests working closer with team members as well as managing anxiety through more effective and relevant training.
9. Strengthening drive agility, trust, and scale
Beyond AI, the priority for CIOs in 2026 should be strengthening the enabling capabilities that drive agility, trust, and scale, says Mike Anderson, chief digital and information officer at security firm Netskope.
Anderson feels that the product operating model will be central to this shift, expanding beyond traditional software teams to include foundational enterprise capabilities, such as identity and access management, data platforms, and integration services.
“These capabilities must support both human and non-human identities — employees, partners, customers, third parties, and AI agents — through secure, adaptive frameworks built on least-privileged access and zero trust principles,” he says, noting that CIOs who invest in these enabling capabilities now will be positioned to move faster and innovate more confidently throughout 2026 and beyond.
10. Addressing an evolving IT architecture
In 2026, today’s IT architecture will become a legacy model, unable to support the autonomous power of AI agents, predicts Emin Gerba, chief architect at Salesforce. He believes that in order to effectively scale, enterprises will have to pivot to a new agentic enterprise blueprint with four new architectural layers: a shared semantic layer to unify data meaning, an integrated AI/ML layer for centralized intelligence, an agentic layer to manage the full lifecycle of a scalable agent workforce, and an enterprise orchestration layer to securely manage complex, cross-silo agent workflows.
“This architectural shift will be the defining competitive wedge, separating companies that achieve end-to-end automation from those whose agents remain trapped in application silos,” Gerba says.
Read More from This Article: 10 top priorities for CIOs in 2026
Source: News