CIOs remain at the forefront of setting the course for AI adoption in their organizations. In fact, 82% of CIO respondents to CIO.com’s 2026 State of the CIO survey are responsible for researching and evaluating AI products, with 78% of IT leaders saying their IT departments are driving AI adoption efforts, with business units aligning…
Enterprise AI is entering a new phase. While the first wave of generative AI focused on human productivity and content creation, the next wave — agentic AI — will fundamentally change how organizations operate. Agentic AI systems are capable of reasoning, planning, making decisions and executing actions across applications, workflows and business processes with minimal…
For diversified enterprises, few operating model questions are as persistent or polarizing as centralization versus decentralization. Decentralization promises speed, ownership, and local responsiveness. Centralization promises efficiency, standardization, and leverage. Both can be right. Both can be wrong. The challenge is that many organizations end up with both models operating at once, without enough clarity about…
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, “AI agent” stopped being a useful term. CIOs may even be afraid to ask what “agent” truly means, as it now seems to describe everything from a chatbot that answers HR questions to an autonomous research system that plans its own week of work. When a single phrase carries…
In one ransomware response I observed, the master operational dashboard remained green while the underlying environment told a very different story. It was a classic example of what we in the IT audit profession call the “watermelon effect”—green on the outside, red on the inside. Beneath that dashboard sat an unmapped web of legacy technical…
China has created an international organization to set standards and introduce regulation for AI, inviting 28 other countries to join — but the US, a leading AI powerhouse is not part it. The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) was established by 29 countries, including China, Russia and Brazil, at a ceremony in Shanghai, China,…
We are inundated with promises that artificial intelligence will save us and that the next governance framework will protect us. Buy this platform, adopt that model and the hard part finally gets easier. After 15 years in this field, I have wanted that shortcut as much as anyone. But both promises are downstream of something…
I keep seeing a version of the same scene. A CEO has a question about AI. It is a real question, the kind that will shape where the company spends the next two years. The CEO does not bring it to the CIO. They bring it to a data leader two levels down, or to…
Once upon a time, there were actual arguments as to whether CIOs should be business people, not technology people. With any luck, these arguments were stomped out back here: “The case against the ‘business-savvy CIO’” — which drove the arguments for this false dichotomy into the ground back in 2018. Some complications have arisen in…
Organizations usually face the same questions concerning XLAs: What should we measure, who owns the data, how should incentives work, and how will this change provider behavior after signature. There are no easy answers either, but after advising clients in MSP relationships with major providers, I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Successful XLA programs…