Can the CIO role prevail over AI?

According to a recent report from the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium, 92% of IT jobs will be transformed by AI to a moderate or high degree. But when it comes to senior-level jobs, 100% will see moderate transformation. And when it comes to business and management IT jobs, 63% were classified as “high transformation” due to AI. And online education company Pluralsight conducted a survey of IT professionals in the US and UK and found that 74% worried AI tools will make many of their daily skills obsolete.

“Generative AI does have the ability to replace CIOs who don’t embrace the innovative shifts coming for companies,” says Tim Crawford, a former CIO himself and now a CIO strategic advisor at AVOA, a technology consultancy. For the rest, gen AI will greatly augment the power and value of the role of the CIO, he says.

According to the consortium’s report, AI has the potential to revolutionize these roles by facilitating more efficient decision-making through data-driven insights. And that applies to jobs at the very highest level. In late 2023, an edX survey of 800 C-suite executives showed that more than half thought executive leadership or C-suite roles will be partly or completely replaced by AI. Nine of out 10 also said at least some of their job could be automated by AI, and nearly half said most or all of their job could be completely replaced by AI.

Andy Thurai, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research adds that AI is also used to help with budgeting, sourcing, and writing vision statements to present to the board. CXOs even ask AIs about where they think their organizations are inefficient, and then compare those responses to what they get from management consulting firms, he says, which is very expensive. “Using generative AI is so cheap, even if they use the highest premium level,” Thurai says.

Sumit Johar, CIO at financial software company BlackLine, says the parts of his job that can be done or augmented by AI include repetitive tasks such as organizing meetings, approvals, and IT ticket management.

“AI can also be trained to handle common queries,” he says, “It creates a personal assistant that’s always available and has access to all the knowledge sitting within organizations.” It can also help make sense of large documents, enabling faster decision-making. “I see AI as a catalyst for a profound job and skill reset,” he adds.

But that doesn’t mean the CIO job will go away, he stresses. Yes, productivity may go up, but the job will likely evolve, with more things to do in areas requiring high-level expertise and strategic decision-making.

Today, 70% of Johar’s time is spent on managing business operations, and the little time remaining, he says, is dedicated to driving business transformation and growth initiatives. With AI augmentation, that balance will shift away from back-end management to innovation and forward-focused projects.

Sharon Mandell, CIO at Juniper Networks, echoes Johar that AI can free up time for her by reducing the emails she has to read, or meetings she has to attend.

“But my role is usually answering questions where conventional wisdom doesn’t apply, and we have to make decisions that involve risk ownership and accountability,” she says. “While AI can streamline the process of gathering data, decisions involving risk and accountability will always require a human touch.”

That’s especially true when it comes to strategic pivots, crisis management, or ethical considerations, she adds.

Still, longevity in a technology-based career requires staying abreast of tech trends, and learning how to leverage those technologies to improve skills and abilities. “One of the main reasons I joined Juniper Networks was because they were clearly investing in AI to make one facet of what CIOs worry about easier to manage: network reliability and security. There was no better way I could have learned about what’s possible and how it could change my role than to live it.”

And now that LLMs and other forms of gen AI have emerged, she’s shifted a significant amount of her time to understanding how it can help the business now and in the future.

“I also think about areas where AI should be helping but isn’t yet,” she says. “So, whether it’s ultimately going to replace me or not, I’m spending an awful lot of my intellectual cycles on it right now.”

The next thing she wants to use AI for is to create her own digital twin, similar to that built by tech entrepreneur and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

“I can imagine a world where there’s a, ‘Come to my digital twin to get my perspective before you have a meeting with me,’ for certain scenarios,” she says. “But that becomes quite impersonal and doesn’t align with having leadership EQ.”

A focus on strategy

Johar and Mandell aren’t the only IT leaders looking forward to their jobs becoming more dynamic as AI continues to evolve.

“Hopefully, the AI is taking some of those routine tasks,” says Henry Svendblad, CTO at Company Nurse, which helps companies handle workplace injuries. “I know some CIOs like that stuff, and some like it too much, but that’s not what I like about the job. I like driving the business forward.”

He says his company’s investments in AI have helped it grow faster than its competitors — 30% this year, he says. “Our service levels are better than they’ve been because we’re using a bot to take on a lot of the routine work our contact center agents were doing.” That means the company’s nurses can spend more time talking with injured employees. “We can do more faster and provide more of that empathy,” says Svendblad.

Finding innovative ways to use AI and impact the business’s bottom line can help a technology leader provide value above and beyond a routine, commodity type of technology management job. “I don’t disagree that some CIOs are in commodity positions,” he says. “And those CIOs should worry about their jobs.”

As LLMs are applied to core functions,  jobs will be certainly eliminated, says Jim Routh, chief trust officer at cloud security company Saviynt. To survive, transformational leadership skills are essential.

“CIOs, CDOs, and CISOs should invest heavily in essential skills to facilitate consensus,” he says, “and demonstrate the ability to speak the language of the business.”

The shift to gen AI represents a change to business operations, he adds, and transformation leadership is essential to manage the change while improving sustainable outcomes. But there are still a lot of organizations that have a lot of work to do on sustainability, cybersecurity, how they handle data, moving to a cloud environment, cleaning up technical debt, and upgrading from legacy systems, says Anand Rao, AI professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

“If the CIO is truly adding value — strategically, operationally, people-wise — I don’t think AI is anywhere close to taking over that job,” he says.

AI limitations in responsibility and EI

One area in which humans differ from AI is in our ability to take responsibility. In the corporate setting, responsibility isn’t a new concept. In regulatory compliance, for example, companies can outsource individual tasks, but they can’t outsource their responsibility for compliance. Similarly, a company can delegate decision-making to an AI system, but a human still has to take responsibility for that decision, says IDC analyst Kevin Prouty.

For smaller companies, or those with increased efficiencies, companies may no longer need a dedicated CIO, he adds. “You might have the CIO rolled into a different role, or you might be able to merge the CIO and CTO,” he says. “But their role isn’t going away. Someone still needs to make the decision.”

What the AI can do is advise the human on what decision to make, but even still, there are some significant limitations. AIs need a lot of training data, and for some types of high-level, strategic decisions, there isn’t much of it. While many low-level functions are often tracked and monitored, this visibility rarely extends to high-level, strategic decision-making.

“We don’t have a very effective measure of how a CIO is doing,” says Rao. “Very few organizations log every decision, and even when they log one, was this decision good or bad?”

Without this baseline data, not only is it difficult to train an AI, but there’s also no way to tell how the AI performs compared to a human.

“If we can’t measure the performance of the CIO, how do we say that the AI is better?” he says. “We won’t be able to.”

Some companies do track decisions in the form of lessons learned, says Chris Mattmann, the chief data and AI officer at UCLA.

“Lessons learned are typically the failure modes,” he says. “What didn’t work?” But for AI-powered decision making, companies need to track the successes as well. “You don’t want to just train AI on the things that didn’t work,” he adds. “You want to track what did.”

But beyond the lack of ability to take responsibility for decisions, and the lack of good data to help the AI learn how to make decisions, there’s also the job of actually turning a decision into action. And that can require quite a bit of emotional intelligence (EI).

Not everyone wants to take orders from an AI, says Mattmann. “But most people would want to report to a human, someone they can look up to; someone they can see themselves being someday,” he says.

People also look to other humans for inspiration. That was the case at his previous job. Before coming to UCLA earlier this year, Mattmann was at NASA for over two decades, serving as CTIO for the past four years. “The CIO at NASA is a change agent,” he says. “This is someone who has to understand technology and human space flight, and be a people manager who has to maintain a culture of thousands of people. In that case, no, I don’t think an AI can replace them.”

In addition to working with employees, CIOs also have to work with other business units — and EI plays a key role here as well.

“Emotional intelligence is a measure of the effort required from an organizational change management perspective to adopt new technologies,” says Brett Barton, global AI practice leader at Unisys. “It advises us on people’s willingness to modify their ways of working.”

This is where EI comes in, he says, and it plays a huge role. “The impetus is on us to focus on the interpersonal relationships with colleagues on the business side so we understand not just the words but the intended direction, and bring them solutions they probably weren’t even aware of,” says Barton. “It’ll take a cycle or two but, all of a sudden, trust is earned, respect is gained, and you become a sought-after partner to enable transformation inside that business unit.”

Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, co-founder and CTO at DataChat, is experiencing that first-hand, with gen AI already impacting the kind of work he does.

“I’m no longer spending time on some of my day-to-day tasks,” he says. “I’ve shifted my focus toward more strategic tasks such as crafting long-term strategies, identifying opportunities for improvement and transformation within the organization, and aligning business goals with AI initiatives.”

And he’s investing time in learning about what’s happening in the AI space so he can spot opportunities when they present themselves.

“It’s also starting to become evident that the future of IT leadership requires not only technical expertise but an understanding of business strategy,” he adds. “So I’m starting to interact more and network with business leaders so I can expand my understanding of the business challenges.”