How future CIOs may assess this period in AI history

Every generation of technology leaders eventually faces a moment when they look back and evaluate how a significant period of time or technology transformation was handled. For example, those who navigated the now ancient mainframe to client-server transition, the rise of the internet and the cloud revolution all faced the same fundamental question. “Did we make decisions based on a clear understanding of the path ahead or did we let the hype cycle noise drown out the signal? Today’s CIOs are facing that question with AI and may want to anticipate how future generations will view this time in history. Except this time, the stakes may well be higher than they have ever been.

Of course, future CIOs always have the benefit of hindsight.

For now, as today’s CIOs lead the future of AI, it helps to simultaneously keep in mind two different time horizons. The first is the near term, five to seven years out, and the second is a longer arc of 10 to 15 years from now. Each demands a different kind of leadership, and each will produce its own set of assumptions, insights and verdicts from future generations.

The near-term verdict: From personal productivity to business transformation

So far, AI has been successful at improving personal productivity of company employees and individuals. Programmers write code faster. Customer service teams resolve tickets more efficiently. Writers, me included, use AI as a capable editorial assistant.

For example, I have been writing a weekly blog since 2005, but only recently have I employed the chatbots as editors. They do a fantastic job cleaning up my original writing without losing my voice or the personal touch in the prose. The collaboration of me as an originator, and the chatbot as a grammar task master works well.

However, personal productivity is not the same as business transformation and that is a critical differentiator at this point in time when it comes to AI in the enterprise.

Part of the CIO’s job in moving from using AI from personal to enterprise-wide productivity is to look at their company and industry sector and identify where AI can be most transformative. And act with conviction in collaboration with executives across every function of the enterprise.

When future CIOs look back at this five-to-seven-year window, the pivotal question will be whether today’s technology leaders pushed AI beyond personal productivity to create compelling new products and services, business models and generate new forms of value.

The longer arc: What 2036 will find primitive and what it will find prescient

Looking a decade or more into the future, I think future CIOs will find two things striking about this period: One unsurprising, and one that is truly impressive.

The hype will not surprise them. Every transformative technology in history has been accompanied by breathless enthusiasm, speculative excess and a good deal of confusion. The dot-com boom is an obvious example. AI is similar in how the enthusiasm and hype has spilled beyond IT circles and into the mainstream. Those who lived through previous transformative cycles will recognize the parallels.

What I think will be truly impressive to the CIOs of 2036 is the pace at which large language models, chatbots and generative AI tools went from novelty to infrastructure. While the progress has been rapid by any historical measure, the adoption curve has been steeper than most anticipated.

From a less positive perspective, as they look back on this time, they will likely find the enormous amount of energy expended on debates about artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence to be a counterproductive waste of time.

These conversations have been a distraction from the more valuable work of exploring how AI can function as a powerful set of cognitive tools in close collaboration with human beings. The question of whether AI is “truly intelligent” or will ultimately “replace” humans is far less useful than the question of what AI can help us accomplish right now by working alongside us.

The rising status of the CIO

I am often asked whether the CIO title will even exist in fifteen years. My answer is not only will it exist, but that it will carry considerably more weight than it does today. The CIO who navigates this era well, serving as a trusted advisor on the strategic deployment of AI while cutting through the noise and the hype, will occupy a position of institutional importance comparable to the CFO. That is a role the finance function spent decades earning. AI is giving technology leaders the opportunity to earn the same standing, and faster.

Bridging 2026 to the future through the human/AI connection

When it comes to setting and executing on the AI path to the future, it’s critical to connect the human-AI relationship. The language I find most useful in this is rooted in collaboration and augmentation as opposed to AI tools as worker replacements.

History gives us reason for confidence here. The technologies that have mattered most, such as steam power, electricity, the computer and the internet, are all technologies that humans learned to deploy closely and purposefully across economies and societies.

AI will follow the same pattern in this century. The question is not whether humans remain central. They will. The question is which humans, in which organizations, are doing the serious work of figuring out how to deploy AI with purpose. This topic is one that I look forward to exploring at this year’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

As AI absorbs more of the routine cognitive work that currently occupies much of our professional lives, the most distinctly human value will concentrate in judgment, the capacity to decide how to use powerful technologies in ways that genuinely improve our economies and societies. That is not a small thing. It is, arguably, the most important thing.

I am optimistic about what that judgment, applied well, can produce. For example, over the next few decades, I expect AI to help us make transformative progress on some of the most intractable challenges in medicine: Cancer, dementia, autism and other conditions that have resisted our best efforts for generations. Those breakthroughs will not come from AI alone. They will come from sustained human-AI collaboration, with researchers and clinicians and technologists working together in ways that neither could manage separately.

That kind of collaboration, at scale, requires international cooperation. I am hopeful that we will achieve it. The challenges are complex, the stakes are high and the history of science and technology gives us examples of what cooperation can accomplish when the will is there. The research community already operates with this orientation. It is not the whole story, but it is a meaningful start.

A letter to the CIO of 2036

If I were writing a letter to a CIO stepping into the role in 2036, I think I would begin by telling them how envious I am.

I was fortunate enough to play a meaningful role in the evolution of computing about 50 years ago, and again with the internet roughly 30 years ago. Those were extraordinary moments to be working in technology. I believe what lies ahead in the next decade will be more extraordinary still. The opportunity to help guide the development and deployment of AI across economies and societies, to be one of the people who figures out how this technology serves human beings at scale, is a remarkable privilege.

To today’s CIOs: You are living inside that letter. The verdicts of 2036 are being written right now, in the decisions you make and the ones you defer. The question is not whether AI will be transformative. It will be. The question is whether you will be among those who led that transformation with clarity, seriousness and purpose.

I wish you all the very best on this very exciting journey.

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