How AI will change the CIO role

What you signed up for five years ago is not what the business expects of you today,” Jonathan Rickard told the NZ CIO Summit in Auckland.

Rickard, chief technology officer Microsoft CX at Fusion5, says AI has pushed CIOs from back-office tech management into front-line strategic leadership. Their job is no longer about implementation alone but about steering digital transformation across the business.

Today’s CIOs are now more involved in business areas such as innovation and revenue-generating initiatives. He says: “It’s no longer a matter of just keeping the lights on.”

CIO is an evolving role

More change is on the way with the CIO role becoming a people-focused, innovation-driven position. There is a strong emphasis on culture and measurable business outcomes.

Rickard quoted research to support this view. Following this year’s Sydney CIO Summit, attendees were asked about their roles. Nearly half, 47 percent, say they focus on innovation and strategy. That’s double the number (23 percent) who said the same five years ago.

The survey shows a majority of CIOs (85 percent) are involved in new revenue opportunities and a similar number (84 percent) say they have greater influence on business decisions.

For Rickard, AI is a general-purpose technology that changes everything. He says some skepticism is understandable; only recently CIOs were told they would be leading their businesses into the metaverse by now.

Instead, he compares AI with the steam engine, the internet, and smartphones. Each of these began with hype, which led to a negative reaction before the technologies were accepted and broadly adopted.

Real gains from intensity of use

What made the difference in each case was the intensity of use. Companies that merely swapped out old tools for new ones saw modest gains. Those that embedded the technology deeply into their processes and business models reaped outsized rewards. Rickard says the same will apply to AI: the real benefits will go to organisations that use it imaginatively and pervasively, not just at the margins.

Troy Gerber, CTO conversational AI and Copilot at Fusion5, says: “In the next two years, 30 percent of our workforce will be digital agents. They’re not going to be replacing people. They’ll be working alongside people.”

Gerber says CIOs will be responsible for integrating these digital agents into the workforce and ensuring they work alongside human employees.

Pressure as expectations increase

This will bring pressure as businesses will expect their AI investments to increase productivity. “The target is to gain two hours per employee every week. It will fall on CIOs to ensure the AI tools are not just implemented, but that they realise the expected gains”.

In addition to dealing with digital employees, he says CIOs will also be asked to help build the talented culture within organisations that is ready and able to leverage the AI technologies as they are rolled out. The responsibility that once resided in an HR department will shift to the CIO.

CIOs are widely expected to take ownership of innovation within a business. Gerber says the way this works will change.

In the past, CIOs rolled out tools and applied guardrails in an orderly process. Now, innovation bubbles up from staff. In many cases, they might adopt consumer-style AI tools (such as ChatGPT) first before looking for support.

Responsive to employee demands

Gerber says the CIO role here will be to respond to demand from employees and shape secure, scalable platforms around it.

This happened in the past with mobile phones. At first, they were telco or phone manufacturer-controlled. Then the smartphone arrived, and we shifted to the app-store-driven model. AI is going through the same change.

These changes are not abstract. Gerber says Fusion5 is going through the process in its own business. “We think of ourselves as a frontier firm: We live that every day, and we take it to our customers.

“Everyone in our organisation has to be AI literate. It’s mandatory. Staff have to go to our monthly AI training. We had a staff meeting last week where we showed a slide featuring our new joiners, and then we had a slide showing the new AI agents that had joined our organisation.”

He says there were eight of them, and they were featured because they are integral to the business. “We don’t bolt AI onto our solutions; it is part of our strategy.”

By showing staff the newcomers, they are able to see where they can be used in the company’s workflow.

Leading teams that mix humans and AI agents requires new leadership styles. That means listening, asking questions, and encouraging participation, not traditional command-and-control.

Gerber likes to quote Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who says success comes from strategic vision with executional discipline. “Success in the AI era belongs to those who can match strategic vision with executional discipline.”