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 of the job still works will soon watch the role lose its centre of gravity, if this hasn’t happened already.

In the last two years I’ve worked with the C-suite of companies including Hyatt, Pearson, Fortnum & Mason, Home Depot and the San Antonio Spurs, training leadership on how to use AI. Increasingly, I see rollouts stall because the CIO is still focused on the technology, when the real challenge isn’t technical; it’s educating people on how to use it. It’s a company-wide, human problem — AI must be first truly lived by the boardroom, then approached human-first.

Why the role has changed

For most of the last two decades, the CIO’s value was navigating risk/reward equally on the technology front. Mostly, opportunities stayed within their own team, who scoped and built them before handing the business the outcome.

AI has changed the flow of this. The opportunities CIOs now need to surface can’t be executed by their own team, because the value is in how finance, sales, HR and operations use the tools themselves. CIOs are being asked to drive change they don’t get to fully own or deliver — a different kind of trust to build with a CEO used to them shipping it directly.

Not adapting to this change risks CIOs being labelled reckless rather than forward-thinking. The real danger in 2026 is to follow these steps in this order: buying the technology, failing to train people and keep using tools that generate zero value. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report found 88% of organisations use AI in at least one function, but fewer than 40% have scaled beyond pilot. MIT’s Project NANDA was starker — despite $30–40 billion invested in enterprise AI, 95% see no measurable return. Dead capital is the risk the CIO should own.

The key to unlocking the value of AI is mass, active, coherent usage across the whole company, which is a different bar than previous tech shifts. Moving to the cloud, for instance, could be rolled out by the CIO’s team. This meant reconfiguring the infrastructure and data migration — the rest of the business barely notices the change underneath them.

AI works in the opposite way. The shift for the CIO now is to go from builder to enabler — making data and tools accessible so the rest of the business can build for themselves, rather than deciding for them.

What it looks like when this works

I worked with Epignosis, the company behind TalentLMS and saw a partnership between Leonidas Palaiokostas, COO and CIO of Epignosis and Dimitris Tsingos, CEO, that set the standard. Palaiokostas once used AI to cut a report from a week’s work down to three hours, but when he sent it round the company, it went unread. Time had been saved, but this doesn’t always directly equal value creation.

What followed was built around that distinction. Tsingos refused to “push AI on people”, instead letting its value show through peer demonstration. Fifteen volunteers across finance, sales, support, engineering, UX and DevOps were given the tools and time to build what was useful to their own work.

The results spoke for themselves — a finance employee built a custom ERP connector in ten minutes, with zero technical background, a people development leader cut transcript analysis from half a day to twenty minutes and sales cut RFP turnaround from a week to thirty minutes. None of it was mandated and by week six, active user growth was up 95% from the previous week and AI use became self-propagating, resulting in the rollout of 250 personal agents for the entire company.

The CEO conversation, and what comes next

Tsingos didn’t wait for a strategy to be delivered to him. He championed AI visibly and let results from across the business make the case. That’s what both roles now need to become — the CEO must stop expecting an ‘AI strategy’ handed up from the CIO and the CIO must make it clear to the CEO that this change won’t happen without them.

‘AI strategy’ is the wrong vocabulary for what this needs anyway. No company has an ‘electricity strategy’ — they have a business that runs on electricity and makes decisions about how to use it. When the CEO hasn’t been visibly involved, some staff default to “if it’s not worth the CEO’s time, it’s not worth mine.” Once that belief sets in, no amount of CIO-led rollout will dislodge it.

If CIOs treat AI as the technology mandate they were given, the role could hollow out, but if they take the opportunity to collaborate across the business and embrace the people mandate, it can be the most consequential work of their careers. This isn’t about whether to ‘do AI’ but about whether to do the new version of the job.