From ambition to action: What Canadian tech leaders must get right to see meaningful value from transformation efforts

It’s no secret that the CIO role is changing in Canadian enterprises. Driving operational performance and increasing efficiency are, of course, still a big part of the job. But CIOs are now expected to do more than cut costs and keep the lights on. Increasingly, boards of directors expect the CIO to play a key role in creating value and enabling their organizations to outperform their rivals. Recent data backs this up. The overwhelming majority (91%) of Canadian technology leaders believe advanced technology will be the primary driver of competitive advantage over the next three years, according to KPMG’s “The 8 execution imperatives for Canadian tech leaders,” a white paper based on the firm’s 2026 Global Tech Report.

The race to capture value from emerging technologies has intensified, leaving little room for organizations that remain on the sidelines. Yet in Canada, just 27% of organizations consider themselves innovators or early adopters, while 72% are fast or slow followers. Nearly all (85%) believe they’ll need to take more risks with emerging technologies just to remain relevant.

The traditional, operational-first mindset among CIOs has become a liability. CIOs are expected to be strategic players, but meeting that expectation requires taking thoughtful, well-considered action across key imperatives.

AI success depends on data

AI is not the only advanced technology that organizations are working to deploy, but it’s certainly garnering the most attention from C-suite executives, boards of directors, and investors. To enable AI at scale, the data foundations enterprises have built over the past decade will be necessary, but they are not sufficient on their own. CIOs must make modernizing the state of enterprise data a top priority.

In most large organizations, data often remains locked inside legacy systems where the system of record is also the system of engagement, and that significantly limits accessibility for AI workloads. Data should be treated as the strategic asset that it has become. The quality, timeliness, and governance of that data vary widely, and reconciling those inconsistencies is one of the most persistent barriers to enterprise-level deployment.

Scaling pilots into enterprise programs also requires closing the gap between AI-native talent, who have the skills to move quickly, and those with deep institutional knowledge, who understand how their organizations work and what they need to achieve. These two groups must work hand in hand. Otherwise, organizations may accelerate toward the wrong goals, which won’t move the business forward.

“The barriers to scaling AI aren’t just technical,” says Sanjay Pathak, partner and national leader, technology strategy and digital transformation services, KPMG Canada. “CIOs need to truly and deeply understand the value chain of what their organizations do. Those who get there will have the imagination, the courage, and the foresight to use AI to transform their organizations.”

Communicating ROI requires the right framing

Beyond scaling, simply communicating the value of AI also poses a significant challenge. Just over half (53%) of Canadian organizations surveyed say they struggle to demonstrate or communicate AI value to stakeholders. Part of the problem is that CIOs are making the wrong argument in the wrong room because they’re framing ROI as a technology metric rather than a business outcome.

“Any CIO who doesn’t truly understand what their business does is missing a beat around how innovation is going to help the organization achieve ROI,” says Pathak. “Understanding how to deploy AI inside your value chain will give you a head start and a competitive advantage in unlocking real business benefits.”

A formal performance measurement framework that tracks customer experience, revenue growth, and employee adoption alongside cost metrics gives CIOs a far more accurate picture of long-term value. Linking funding decisions to those strategic outcomes makes sustained investment easier to justify.

There is also a compliance dimension that often goes unacknowledged in these conversations. CIOs who bring business, technology, and compliance leaders together to design innovative processes that are “compliant by design” from the start are protecting future value as much as they are delivering value today.

“You need to assemble that multi-dimensional cohort of business, technology, risk, and compliance leaders at the same table, envisioning compliance by design,” says Pathak. “The winners in this space are going to be the ones who really think about business ambition holistically and focus on efficient delivery, operations, and compliance.”

Building disciplined innovation governance

An organization’s approach to governance makes an enormous difference in how quickly and confidently it can deploy and take advantage of advanced technologies. As noted above, almost three-quarters (72%) identify as fast or slow followers, and 85% say they need to move more aggressively to embrace new technologies. Canadian organizations aren’t lacking ambition. What they lack are the conditions required to innovate with confidence: clear ownership, defined risk thresholds, and shared accountability between technology, risk, and business teams.

“You can be an innovator, but if your innovation is not directly connected to strategic business ambition and safety guardrails such as risk management, governance, and compliance, you’re creating labware,” says Pathak. “Being an early adopter means you’re comfortable with the technology. To make it truly viable, you must embrace all dimensions of enterprise value.”

Strong governance does not slow innovation down but instead provides a structure that builds confidence and resilience at every level of the organization, from the board to project teams. A tiered governance approach that takes risk into account allows organizations to advance low-risk, incremental improvements and high-reward initiatives in parallel.

Expanding partnerships to accelerate innovation

Innovation isn’t a single-player game, and Canadian organizations know it. Ninety-seven percent of respondents say they plan to expand their external ecosystems. To date, a significant portion of those relationships have been transactional and focused on a specific capability or problem. But savvier organizations are moving toward multi-party innovation, where partners pool capabilities to share both risk and reward. This model requires a different kind of commitment because organizations are betting on a partner’s long-term viability, not just their current capability. Together, they must build the integration and governance infrastructure that makes these ecosystems work for all participants.

“Moving to multi-party innovation ecosystems is an investment in integration and data,” says Pathak. “If you’re going to look at best of breed and stitch those together, what must be true for that to work is the ability for those different ecosystems to integrate and interoperate. And that creates a much stronger need for safety and governance.”

Cybersecurity is another dimension that grows more important with every new partner added to the ecosystem. Security should be proactively built in, not imposed after a breach has already occurred.

“The more ecosystem-based partnerships you have, the more opportunity you create along with the threat you have to deal with,” says Pathak. “You expand the attack surface, and you become more of a target, so governance and cybersecurity must be designed in from the start, not bolted on later.”

Canadian government incentives, including Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credits and AI-focused clusters, offer a way to share some of the cost and risk, particularly during periods of economic uncertainty.

By leveraging these funding frameworks alongside robust ecosystem governance, forward-thinking organizations can safely scale their networks to turn shared risks into sustainable competitive advantages.

In closing

For organizations navigating this environment, KPMG Canada emphasizes that the most consequential decisions ahead are not purely, or even mostly, technical. They are about how CIOs choose to lead, partner, measure, and govern in a period that rewards both ambition and discipline in equal measure.

The data points are clear. CIOs who lead with both strategic ambition and disciplined execution will elevate their organizations above their competitors. By paying attention to the quality of their data, aligning technical priorities with critical business goals, and instituting strong governance and cybersecurity, they will set a higher standard for what Canadian competitiveness looks like in the years ahead.

To learn more, read the full whitepaper: The Top 8 Execution Imperatives for Canadian Tech Leaders.