IT leaders: Perform these 3 actions in 2025, says PwC

“It’s a great time to be a talented CIO,” says Dallas Dolen, principal in PwC’s Technology practice. PwC believes a confluence of advancements in gen AI, IoT, and the semiconductors that support them and other tech innovations are poised to fundamentally change how businesses operate and deliver value.

Gen AI enables new content creation and the automation of complex tasks, while IoT drives efficiency and real-time data insights in both smart homes and factories. And rapid advances in semiconductors are supporting both trends.

Integrating new technologies can help businesses unlock new value streams and improve efficiency. Some examples include sports entertainment organizations leveraging smart venues to provide fans with personalized experiences, and manufacturers turning to augmented reality and advanced robotics to transform the factory floor.

In PwC’s June 2024 Pulse Survey, 85% of technology, media, and telco executives reported they have the capability to execute business models and scale by leveraging these technologies. And 76% said they plan to use gen AI to ramp up those efforts.

These innovations offer immense potential, says Dolen, but the complexity involved in realizing that potential means CIOs and other tech leaders have a prime opportunity to play a strategic role in rethinking business models and delivery strategies.

It’s not just about adapting to disruption, but thriving in an era of evolving competition and customer expectations, he adds. Organizations will have to make potentially big bets because the winners are likely to be the organizations that successfully navigate decisions about adopting technologies, like AI agents, as soon as they become commercially viable.

Move fast to solve the talent shortage

First-mover advantage isn’t just about gaining early experience with emerging technologies. CIOs are no strangers to talent droughts, but Dolen believes the issue will only grow more acute. He notes that in PwC’s recent CEO survey, every question showed that a substantial amount is thinking about adopting these technologies.

“If 40 to 60% of companies embrace these trends, chances are we won’t have enough people to do it,” he says.

CIO’s State of the CIO 2025 survey shows that 54% of CIOs already feel staff and skills shortages is the challenge most often forcing them to redirect their focus away from strategic and innovative tasks. These CIOs say they’re having the most trouble finding talent for AI and machine learning (38%), cybersecurity (33%), and data science and analytics (21%).

Dolen predicts specialists in cloud engineering and ERP will become especially hard to come by, and security specialists will be in more demand than ever. CIOs who are late to adopt may find they can’t fill the technical roles they need.

Help the business navigate complexity

Beyond dealing with the talent shortage, Dolen says CIOs are increasingly becoming essential to help business leaders navigate complexity. Many organizations eagerly jumped on gen AI as potentially transformative to their business, but have struggled to achieve the results they imagined.

PwC’s Pulse Survey showed 61% of tech companies had adopted gen AI in a few or many areas of their businesses, and 84% of executives said they’re increasing their cloud budgets in the next planning cycle with gen AI as the leading driver of the increases. Plus, 45% of executives expect gen AI to achieve more savings in the coming months, especially as AI agents take on more tasks.

“In application, the usage rates are probably not as high as what people want, which is indicative of value,” Dolen says. “I think that’s true across the board with the model builders as well as the deployers.”

Part of the issue has been the complexity of scaling and targeting these projects. Dolen notes that many of the teams doing proofs of concept (PoCs) of gen AI projects were business-oriented and moved forward at a rapid clip until they ran into regulatory and compliance issues they weren’t equipped to deal with.

“Where’s the data going?” Dolen asks. “And who’s going to be in charge of ensuring it doesn’t go to places it’s not allowed to go, or that I don’t use these tools in countries where there are embargoes, or I’m not allowed to use a specific tool or have to use someone else’s? All those complexities get layered in.”

Scaling PoCs has also proven to be a challenge.

“Hypothetically, if you were to spend a million dollars on a PoC and you saved 5, 10, or 15% of the time of an individual, you’d wonder how scalable that million dollars is and how many PoCs do I need to build. And then how do I deploy that enterprise-wide,” he says.

CIOs are rightfully starting to ask, for example, why they should buy a license for all 25,000 employees when a more targeted approach could achieve similar results more efficiently.

Organize data to unlock value

Delivering data governance and data organization isn’t just about compliance. It’s also foundational to data monetization, which 38% of respondents in CIO’s State of the CIO 2025 survey said would be the most significant business initiative to drive IT investment in their organization. And 46% of executives in PwC’s Pulse Survey said data monetization was a major challenge.

“I think access to data is going to be the number-one constraint on future entrance to certain industries, whether it’s media-oriented, a telco, or banking in capital markets and insurance,” Dolen says.

So companies need to organize their information better, Dolen adds, to make themselves look better as targets for M&A, or to lock down joint business ventures (JBRs) or licensing agreements with third parties. And CIOs will play a key role in making it happen.

About 80% of respondents to PwC’s survey said they’ve already modernized or planned to modernize their data within the next 12 months to take advantage of gen AI. To do so, they plan to configure better ways to store, manage, and access their data (and adopt advanced analytics tools) to help their organizations make more informed and strategic decisions, as well as improve overall business outcomes.

“You’ll see the need to perfect data to make it valuable for others to use,” Dolen says. “Are there limits on the type of transactions because of concerns where this data can go, where it can live, and how it lives there? You have to have a CIO with a really excellent point of view on what it is we might do with a given partner.”