9 projects top of mind for IT leaders today

CIOs today are looking to drive a new wave of transformation armed with artificial intelligence, generative AI, and now AI agents, too.

“If I had to name the top projects CIOs are driving today, it’s clear the agenda is shaped by one word: reinvention,” says Tejas Patel, leader of tech strategy and advisory for APAC at professional services firm Accenture.

There are, of course, many steps as part of that transformation and reinvention.

And those steps contain a mix of IT mainstays and business objectives, as the CIO list of top-of-mind projects show.

Here, we break down the strategic areas and initiatives that IT leaders plan to spend time on this year, according to data from CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO survey, additional research results, CIOs, and other enterprise leaders.

1. Business transformation

Transformation remains the main undertaking for many CIOs, as more and more IT leaders shed the idea of “IT projects” and instead shift to strategies that utilize technology to remake the business.

“To be honest, the term ‘IT project’ feels a little outdated,” says Trevor Schulze, chief digital and information officer at software company Alteryx. “What we’re leading are business transformation efforts that just happen to be tech-enabled. In the AI era, CIOs aren’t just delivering solutions; we’re helping to write the playbook for how companies compete and grow.”

Data from TEKsystems’ 2025 State of Digital Transformation report backs up such assertions — at forward-looking companies. The research found digital transformation to be a core pillar of 85% of organizations identified as digital leaders, compared with 44% of those identified as laggards.

Transformation is also front and center for Dennis Hodges, CIO of Inteva Products, a global automotive supplier of engineered components and systems.

“My top priority is digital transformation across the organization, with the goal of better managing operating functions through simplified and unified management systems,” he says. “This includes business maturity modeling; process improvement and RPA to enhance current methods of operating; reviewing the complete application portfolio for improved integration and functionality; and AI to transform the entire process area.”

2. Value creation

CIOs are also keenly focused on initiatives that create value for their organizations, whether through automation projects to boost productivity or via AI-enabled revenue-generating initiatives, says Mark Taylor, CEO of the Society for Information Management (SIM), a nonprofit professional association.

CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO survey calls this out, noting that “2025 technology spend is being directed to more strategic business initiatives aimed at revenue growth and nurturing customers. Monetizing company data was the top business imperative for 38% of 2025 respondents followed up by improving the customer experience (35%) and developing new digital revenue streams (32%).”

Research firm Gartner similarly identified this trend in its 2025 CIO Leadership Perspective report, saying that “this year, CIOs report that increasing revenue is one of their top priorities across the enterprise, demonstrating that technology is a key revenue driver.”

3. Impactful AI

That value-creation mentality is also informing which AI initiatives CIOs are pushing for now, as IT chiefs work with business colleagues to identify the opportunities where AI “can move the needle.”

“This year, one of our top priorities is scaling AI across the enterprise — not just in pockets or pilots, but in ways that move the needle,” says Alteryx’s Schulze, adding that this objective is shaping the work performed by his team. “We’re focused on building a strong AI services platform for this. Governed, high-quality data pipelines, the proper infrastructure to support responsible AI, and large language models tailored to real business use cases.”

Like many CIOs, Schulze is shifting “from AI experimentation to real enablement.”

“Our focus areas include automating support functions (internal and external), enhancing customer journey analytics, and embedding intelligence into internal GTM systems,” he says. “The business driver is speed — reducing the time from insight to action.”

4. AI security

CIOs are pairing impactful AI projects with initiatives that bolster both the security and the governance of their AI capabilities.

Schulze, for example, lists this as a top project at his organization, noting that he knows others who have similarly put it on their to-do lists.

“I’m hearing from many peers wrestling with how to scale AI safely, especially regarding model transparency, data lineage, and vendor sprawl,” Schulze says. “We’re approaching AI governance the same way we approached SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley] back in the day: Don’t bolt it on later; bake it in from the start and make it part of how the whole business operates.”

Accenture’s Patel offers similar observations, explaining that AI opens new attack surfaces — for example, through the possibility of model poisoning — and also creates new risks, such as through AI hallucinations.

So CIOs must take action to address those, he adds.

“AI is the new security frontier. CIOs are embedding threat detection into AI models and tightening the controls around how AI is trained, governed, and deployed. The emphasis is on protecting the intelligence layer before attackers target it,” he says.

Challenges exist, though. Patel points out that security tools have not yet adapted for the AI stack (models, agents, APIs) and that there’s a lack of unified governance across AI, data, cloud, and security.

5. Enterprise security

That attention to AI governance and security dovetails with the broader enterprise security work that CIOs are prioritizing today — work that’s continuing a multiyear trend.

CIOs across industries and even across the spectrum of digital maturity have indicated in interviews, surveys, and reports that bolstering their organization’s security posture dominates their agenda again this year, as it has in the past.

For example, the TEKsystems survey found that bolstering cybersecurity is a top 10 goal among digital leaders for 2025.

CIO.com’s State of the CIO survey found that meeting compliance requirements was the No. 2 business initiatives cited by CIOs for 2025 and increasing cybersecurity protections was the No. 2 initiative listed by line of business (LOB) respondents.

Meanwhile, Gartner’s CIO Leadership Perspectives report found that “CIOs cited cybersecurity and risk management as their number one priority for the fourth year in a row.”

“Security is always going to be top of mind,” says Thomas Phelps IV, CIO of Laserfiche and an advisory board member for the SIM Research Institute.

Phelps says implementing new security technologies, advancing third-party risk assessments, and boosting data privacy assurance are among his top projects for this year.

6. Customer experience

Enhancing the customer experience (CX) continues to be a top project for CIOs today.

According to the State of the CIO survey, “IT leaders are championing a range of technologies given the renewed attention on customer experience.” That range of technologies includes data and analytics as well as AI/ML and automation.

Phelps’ work on CX mirrors that observation.

For example, Laserfiche is adding automation to the quoting process to give customers more visibility into transactions. The company is also adding automation to order fulfillment and customer support. And it’s using AI to help the company gain a 360-degree view of customers and their needs to improve the speed and effectiveness of its customer support program, as well as to offer more self-service options.

“Our customers are always expecting more in terms of responsive and high-quality support, so we have a number of initiatives to help streamline those customer support interactions,” Phelps explains.

7. The IT foundation

Although CIOs are forging ahead with the latest AI and automation technologies, they are still giving significant attention to core IT capabilities.

According to Gartner’s 2025 CIO Agenda, “more than 80% of CIOs plan to make investments in foundational capabilities, including: cybersecurity, GenAI, business intelligence and data analytics, and integration technologies like APIs.”

The report further states that “these foundational technologies drive innovation, enhance operational efficiency and help enterprises maintain competitive advantage in an increasingly digital landscape.”

SIM’s Taylor says CIOs are, for example, upgrading enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, refining their use of cloud to optimize compute while minimizing costs, and shedding legacy systems. Others cite upgrades, such as the move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 before Microsoft ends support for the older version.

CIOs say they recognize the continuing need to be flawless at the IT fundamentals in order to move their organizations into the future.

8. IT modernization

All that work on the fundamentals doesn’t mean CIOs accept the status quo; in fact, IT leaders are eager to remake their tech stacks with modern capabilities and are making it a major part of their work schedule.

For Joshua Bellendir, SVP of IT and CIO at WHSmith North America, that means “retiring old legacy systems that are slowing us down, introducing modern solutions, and building foundational data and system layers. Everything we do — modernizing, cloud-first — will support our data initiative and will give us the data we want for AI and allow us to scale and the business to grow.”

Accenture’s Patel says demand for scalable, regionally adaptive IT cores, regulatory pressures, and data sovereignty drive much of today’s modernization efforts.

CIOs are moving to modular, cloud-first architectures tailored to regional needs as well as an “asset-right” strategy balancing cloud and owned infrastructure, he adds.

Modernization, however, is not an easy task, Patel says, as fragmented legacy estates, vendor lock-in, and limited cloud-readiness of core business applications create significant challenges.

9. Reimagining IT for the future

Bellendir isn’t just modernizing WHSmith North America’s IT infrastructure; he’s future-proofing it by, for example, moving to microservices and other approaches and technologies that will better support business goals — such as enhanced CX — in the upcoming years.

“We’re building a foundation for the future, so we can do whatever we want to do; that’s key to my strategy at present,” he says. “From an IT project and systems perspective, future-built is really specific to our specific business, where we are going and what we are planning to do.”

He adds: “I think we’re well positioned with the investments we’ve made at this point.”

Patel agrees with the need for future-proofing and “reinventing the tech-operating model.”

“Traditional IT structures can’t support the pace of change,” he says. “We’re seeing a pivot toward AI-first operating models — leaner teams, flattened hierarchies, and a human-plus-machine approach to delivery. CIOs are becoming architects of organizational agility.”