What’s next for CIOs? Omnicom’s Leif Maiorini has insights

Like many CIOs, Omnicom’s Leif Maiorini has become all too familiar over the past few years with the challenges of ever-shrinking IT roadmaps.“CIOs used to follow a five-year planning cycle, but five years is an eternity,” says the advertising and public relations titan’s CIO for corporate services.

Agentic AI, arguably one of the most transformative technologies that technology leaders are grappling with today, only burst onto the public consciousness two years ago, Maiorini notes.

“We’ve only had the iPhone for 10 years,” he says. “How could you predict five years in the future?”

Yet staying on top of emerging and evolving technologies and their potential impact on business strategies is fundamental for IT leaders in support of the business’s missions. Doing so requires staying on the front end with clients to understand what they are doing and how evolving trends affect their businesses, Maiorini contends.

“It might not even be computer technology trends,” he says. “It might be biological technology; it might be life sciences. We [Omnicom] support a large number of different types of businesses, from communications and PR companies to life sciences companies.”

To thread this needle, Maiorini employs a strategic planning group within the IT function that focuses on looking forward. The group engages with Omnicom’s front-end businesses, specifically stakeholders focused on innovation and strategic initiatives.

“We need to understand what they’re seeing so we can use that to craft our IT strategy,” he says.

One of the most important areas of focus today is what agentic AI capabilities mean for Omnicom and its clients and how those capabilities will transform business processes.

“It’s not necessarily about what agentic AI can do for automating personal work, which it does,” Maiorini says. “My focus is on how we fundamentally change business processes as a result of being able to take advantage of this technology.”

Current business processes are based on human organizational systems and tend to be hierarchical, based on command-and-control messaging (top down), status messaging (bottom up), or information delivered from the front end.

“You get these communication lines going through lots of layers within the organization, vertically,” he says. “A lot of these technologies are going to shrink that down and change the organizational structure drastically. You’ll see a compression of the vertical organization into more horizontal, more focused teams on specific applications.”

Maiorini will discuss how CIOs can face the challenges of accelerating disruption at this week’s CIO 100 Leadership Live: New York conference at Convene, One Liberty Plaza. Anchoring the event’s capstone forum, “What’s Next for the CIO: Preparing for the Next 12-24 Months,” Maiorini and CIO Contributing Editor Lane Cooper will discuss what’s coming next for CIOs, from AI economics to organizational redesign.

The CIO 100 Leadership Live: New York conference will kick off on Thursday, offering CIOs and up-and-coming technology leaders peer insights into what is working inside complex organizations today.

The one-day event, complimentary for qualified IT professionals and their teams, will consist of CIOs and other senior technology and data executives discussing strategic initiatives they have led and how they achieved real-world results. The event will include a career development luncheon and a TechCrunch VC briefing offering insights from venture capitalists on emerging technologies that are gaining traction and poised to disrupt the enterprise.

The event will begin at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 16, with an executive roundtable, “Beyond the Pilot — Building the Infrastructure for Real AI Returns.” It will end with a networking reception beginning at 4:30 p.m.