Monthly Archives: August 2026

The CIO as a capital allocator: Why the best CIOs think like investors, not engineers

For a long time, the role of the chief information officer has been defined around systems, architecture and innovation. The expectation was straightforward: ensure uptime, modernize infrastructure and occasionally introduce transformative technologies. From where I sit, the most important technology decisions are no longer purely technical. They are capital allocation decisions. Every architecture choice, platform…

Explainable AI is necessary, but it’s not enough

A fraud model looks at an insurance claim and returns a score of 0.23: low risk. A SHAP explanation lays out exactly why: no prior claims, a modest claim value, an unremarkable claimant profile. A human adjuster reads the explanation, agrees with it and signs off. Every box that explainable AI asks us to check…

When AI explains its decision, humans may stop thinking independently

AI is known to be confidently wrong, and now it’s influencing humans to be that way, too. In a new study, researchers tested AI’s influence on humans reviewing innovation proposals, and found that AI recommender tools were persuasive enough to convince the evaluators to reject decisions made by independent human experts, thus causing them to…

How a new AI value framework and stakeholder focus keep Zoetis ahead of the pack

Most AI investment strategies fail not because the tool or platform underperforms, but because organizations didn’t clearly define what success looks like before they started building. Through a new approach to measuring value, Zoetis chief digital and technology officer Keith Sarbaugh and his business partners have leveraged a value-driven framework to scale AI solutions across…

Ways CIOs can maintain control amid changes brought by AI

It took nine seconds for an AI agent to destroy PocketOS’s production database. At work on a routine task in April, the coding agent, a variant of Cursor running on Claude Opus 4.6, ran into a credential mismatch and decided to fix the problem by triggering an API token. Little did PocketOS founder Jer Crane…

The CEO has always trusted the CIO to say no. That’s changed with AI

I spent years as a CTO before founding Mindstone and one of the key learnings from my time in the role was that the CIOs and CTOs who are honest with themselves about what the role entails are the ones who will define the next decade of their function. Those who pretend the old version…

The AI leapfrog effect: Why standardizing now could be your costliest mistake

Towards the end of 2022, something shifted in enterprise boardrooms. Convinced by the promise of a genuinely new class of technology, businesses began investing in AI across marketing, sales, developer platforms, analytics and automation. The experimentation was justified. Use cases were unclear, the cost of not participating felt higher than the cost of overspending, and…

Snowflake adds dynamic model routing to Cortex AI Gateway to cut enterprise AI costs

Snowflake on Tuesday unveiled a dynamic model routing capability for its Cortex AI Gateway, designed to help enterprises reduce AI spending by automatically directing workloads to the most appropriate model based on cost, performance, and latency requirements. The new capability, which is expected to be in private preview soon, will allow enterprises to define which…

Not every problem needs an AI agent

When generative AI (GenAI) first arrived, I was in charge of a large team of data and machine learning engineers. We had built a full ML platform from scratch and had dozens of models in production delivering measurable results. AI was working for us. But with the novelty of GenAI came the hype. Under pressure…

CIOs earn AI reprieve, but ROI pressure is surging

2026 arrived as the year AI ROI would need to get real. After years of experiments and pilots that largely failed to scale, CEOs’ No. 1 priority for CIOs was to achieve demonstrable benefits from AI investments. Under that pressure, CIOs started to feel the heat, with 71% of IT leaders in February saying they…