CIOs risk being sidelined in enterprise AI initiatives

The AI revolution has created new opportunities for CIOs, with expanded responsibilities and more authority, but some observers see the opposite happening at some organizations.

While many CIOs have become the main executive leading AI strategy and initiatives, some organizations have set the responsibility for AI deployment and adoption with another executive.

That puts CIOs in a real danger of being sidelined during the internal AI debate, according to some IT leaders and observers. Many organizations, for example, have appointed chief AI officers, and other industry experts suggest AI initiatives should be the purview of the CEO.

AI adoption is too important and pervasive to be confined to a single department, argues Nishith Rastogi, founder and chief executive and technology officer of AI-driven logistics solutions provider Locus. As a result, the CEO needs to be the main champion of the technology, he adds,

Rastogi recently combined the CEO and CTO at Locus to focus on AI. For now, he wants to be directly involved in all new AI initiatives at Locus, which doesn’t currently have a CIO.

“The job of a CEO is to be worrying about the leading indicators and the lagging indicators, and we are a technology company,” he says. “We must be at the absolute forefront of that, and the profound shift that is happening today is that AI is the new IT.”

At some point in Locus’ growth journey, however, the company will need a CIO, and the CIO will be heavily involved in AI-related operations, Rastogi predicts.

“I may get the ball rolling, I will put the hamster wheel in motion, but I would definitely need a CIO and CTO to take it to closure and truly realize all the impacts,” he says. “If everybody starts using LLMs and AI and everybody becomes more efficient, the need for someone to manage, to deploy, to create infrastructure actually expands.”

The rise of the CAIO

When it’s not the CEO taking the reins, many enterprises are passing over the CIO to create a new title to lead deployment efforts. A report from IBM’s Institute for Business Value found that 76% of surveyed organizations now have a CAIO, up from just 26% in 2025.

Appointing a CAIO can undercut the CIO’s mandate in some cases, says Debbie Madden, founder and chairwoman of AI consulting and software engineering firm Stride.

“Here’s how this might play out,” she says. “The board applies pressure to adopt AI, the CIO responds with infrastructure or cost savings answers, and now there’s a chief AI officer who owns the most strategic budget in the company.”

But getting into a turf war about AI and IT budgets is the wrong approach for CIOs, Madden says. “The moment you’re defending the IT budget, you’ve already positioned yourself as a cost center, and cost centers don’t get handed the AI mandate,” she adds.

Instead, the CIOs gaining scope inside their organizations tie every AI initiative to revenue growth, margin protection, risk reduction, or speed, she says. Proactive CIOs also take on difficult AI governance issues.

“They claim the governance questions before anyone else does: who owns the output, who reviews it before it touches a customer, and what’s the rollback path when the system is wrong,” she explains. “Whoever answers those questions owns AI. That’s the turf worth taking.”

Madden sees the CIO role splitting as AI becomes more pervasive within enterprises. “There’s the infrastructure job, keeping systems running, and there’s the value job, deciding where AI changes how work gets done,” she says. “AI is pulling those apart, and the CIOs consolidating power are the ones taking the value job.”

Broadening the definition

Dustin Engel, founder and principal consultant at AI consulting firm Elegant Disruption, also sees CIOs potentially losing responsibility as the organization deploys AI, but it’s often because the CIO role is defined too narrowly.

“CIOs are not being sidelined because AI is too technical,” he says. “They are being sidelined when AI becomes too strategic for the way the CIO role has been defined inside the company.”

When some organizations appoint a CAIO, it signals that leadership doesn’t believe that the CIO’s existing technology function can turn AI into a practical operating agenda, he suggests.

“If the CIO is viewed as the person who keeps systems running, AI will move around them,” Engel adds. “If the CIO is viewed as the person who helps the business redesign how work gets done, AI expands their influence.”

Engel agrees that CIOs should avoid turf battles. At many enterprises, AI will show up across the organization, in marketing, sales, finance, legal, HR, operations, and the product team, and the CIO can’t be everywhere.

“If the CIO tries to control all of that from the center, the business will either slow down or go around IT,” he says. “The CIO does not need to own every AI project. The CIO needs to make sure the company does not end up with disconnected experiments, weak governance, and tools that cannot scale.”

There’s also a danger in removing AI responsibilities from the top IT executive at an organization, some experts say. Good CIOs can help AI integrate into other IT systems, says Ken Ringdahl, CTO of expense intelligence vendor Emburse.

“If AI sits outside the CIO’s remit, the CIO may lose scope, but the company also loses coherence,” he says. “AI is not a feature that can simply be bolted onto the business. It has to be integrated into applications, data, security controls, and everyday workflows, and without that integration, organizations end up with fragmented experiments, inconsistent results, and a much heavier burden of training and enablement.”

A CAIO can bring focus and expertise to AI deployments, but the role often doesn’t have the authority to change systems, workflows, and operating models across the enterprise, he adds. The CIO, however, typically does have that remit.

“A chief AI officer can accelerate the AI agenda but cannot substitute for the authority required to transform the organization,” he says.

Working together

Like Locus’ Rastogi, Ringdahl believes the CEO has an important role to play during AI deployment and integration. But the CIO has a role as well.

“The CEO owns the AI mandate; the CIO owns the machinery that makes it real,” he says. “The CEO must establish why AI matters, where it should create value, and how leaders will be held accountable for adoption and results. The CIO then turns that mandate into an integrated, secure and scalable capability across the company’s systems and workflows.”

Rastogi encourages CIOs to stay in the game by turning themselves into AI experts.

“The encouraging part here is that the entire art is just a couple of years old, so in under a month, you can pretty much catch up to the very top,” he says. “The moment you do that, you become literally the most indispensable and the most needed resource in the organization because every leader wants to partner with you to supercharge them.”