The C-suite is expanding — and IT leaders are stepping up

Customer centricity is hardly a new organizational imperative, but some organizations have gone a step further, instituting new C-suite roles to help lead the charge.

Interlace Health is one such entity, having named Maggie Peña as the electronic forms company’s first-ever chief experience officer.

Peña has been with the company for nearly 13 years in customer-facing roles, most recently, building a customer success management team. Interlace Health’s president wanted Peña “to take that approach company-wide,’’ she says. The company doesn’t have a CIO, and Peña’s job blends both business and IT as she oversees software implementations, as well as customer support and customer success management.

Even before she ascended into the C-suite, Peña felt her position could have a direct impact on the business. “In the C-suite, the fact that I have a voice in what we can do and should be doing for our customers is gratifying,” she says.

The C-suite is expanding to include more IT leaders today, a reflection of how important technology is to the business. Besides chief experience officer, other recently ascending titles include chief AI officer (CAIO), chief transformation officer, and chief sustainability officer. In some cases, like at Interlace Health, there is no CIO, and one could argue the CIO title is having a bit of an identity crisis, as the technology mandate broadens and the ability of a single leader to oversee it becomes more challenging.

“Technology such as AI is redefining business models, requiring organizations to make the seismic shift from a novice technology organization to a mature and trusted leader,’’ says Raj Sharma, consulting vice chair at EY Americas. “As a result of this shift, we have seen an emergence of new technology-focused roles becoming more commonplace.”

In addition to the established CIO, CTO, CISO, and chief digital officer (CDO) roles, Sharma says EY is seeing “additional instances” of chief innovation officers and chief experience officers.

“The importance of technology to businesses continues to increase and not only is the role of the CIO becoming elevated, but the other C-suite leaders are becoming more tech-savvy as they take a hands-on approach to sponsoring and overseeing major technology programs that affect their functional areas,’’ he notes.

These new C-suite leaders offer specialization and a focus on specific areas of technology that all support the CIO. They also redefine the CIO role by taking over various operational aspects of IT management. “These new roles allow the CIO to transition into a more strategic role, contributing to overall business strategy and digital transformation efforts,’’ Sharma says.

Increasingly, new C-suite roles with a tech bent are permeating companies. A March report from Deloitte on technology trust ethics found that 38% of respondents are planning to hire a chief ethics officer, while 36% are hiring a chief trust officer to ensure ethical considerations are addressed with the use of emerging technologies.

Even roles that aren’t so new are achieving new heights of importance. A recent study from AuditBoard found that CFOs play a less active role than CISOs when it comes to complying with new SEC cyber rules and that 75% of respondent executives reported that a cybersecurity expert sits on their board. 

The rise of the CAIO

When Jeff Boudreau became CAIO at Dell last fall, he says there were fewer than 30 CAIOs in the world. As part of his background in engineering, Boudreau had been working with AI for years.

With AI at an inflection point, Dell’s leadership wanted someone with “dedicated, focused leadership” who had both tech and business acumen because the company has determined AI is “our No. 1 priority … and we want to build that out across the entire enterprise,’’ Boudreau says.

He is tasked with leading the AI strategy both inside and outside Dell to leverage the technology “to provide better, efficient services to our customers and the people we serve,’’ Boudreau says. This includes defining and refining the company’s business processes and governance models — and going through a backlog of 1,000 AI project ideas.

As a member of the C-suite, Boudreau, in collaboration with Dell Global CTO John Roese, performed a comprehensive AI education primer for the company’s board members, unpacking where the technology is evolving and the role Dell can play.

He believes CAIOs are going to crop up in all industries, especially in companies that don’t fully understand the technology.

“We’re in the early innings and it’s such a cool tech transition; … this will have a long tail and will have bigger inflection and a bigger impact,’’ he says of AI and more recently emerging generative AI technologies. “I’m excited about the seat I’m in and participating in this fourth revolution.”

Boudreau says he jokes that if he does his job right and enables people to use AI to do their jobs better, “my role will go from CAIO to chief productivity officer” to help employees be more successful in their roles.

“I do want to see what we can do with this technology to drive mankind,’’ he says. So much can be done with AI to improve the world, he says. “I see myself leaning into this more. There is a huge opportunity for that.”

Chief sustainability officers: Increasing energy efficiency with IT

As someone who is passionate about energy and technology, the newly created role of chief energy and sustainability officer at real estate investment trust company Prologis was a natural fit for Susan Uthayakumar.

Prior to joining the company in January, Uthayakumar was at Schneider Electric for 17 years. She welcomed the challenge of decarbonizing 1.2 billion square feet of real estate in 19 countries. “About 3% of the world’s GDP flows through our distribution centers. … The only way to tackle a challenge of this size is if you use technology’’ and look at data to make buildings efficient, she says. “I thought I’d have a greater impact here.”

Prologis’ customer base spans Fortune 500 companies as well as small and midsize businesses. “Large customers have their own ambitions for decarbonization so our interests match,’’ she notes. “Medium-sized customers may not have ambition and may or may not have resources, so our ability to provide that support became greatly appreciated.”

A major part of reducing their carbon footprint involves building software and a technology architecture to manage all the company’s distributed energy assets, Uthayakumar says.

Prologis has added a few new tech-focused positions to the C-suite, but adding an energy person is not something you will see at a lot of companies, she says.

“It is unusual for a real estate company to have an energy expert at the C-suite’’ level, she says. But decarbonization is on the minds of their customers and regulators, and Uthayakumar says her position allows her “to integrate technology and the management and decarbonization into the core of the company. It’s much easier to drive change and transformation when you have a voice.”

For Sophie Graham becoming chief sustainability officer at cloud software company IFS in January was a recognition of how sustainability has been elevated in the business. IFS leadership determined that it could be “part of the company’s growth strategy rather than a nice-to-have,’’ she says.

Part of her role is determining what technologies the company needs to meet its sustainability goals. “I’ve been looking at green coding and how we can program more efficiently and account for carbon across our software,’’ she says, adding that IFS hosts its cloud on Microsoft Azure, which is carbon neutral. The company is also utilizing tools to measure internal emissions as well as those of its customers to show the savings by moving to the cloud.

“Sustainability has been crying out for digitization,’’ Graham says.

Chief transformation officers: Instituting change

In addition to Uthayakumar, in January Prologis appointed Lisa Vincent as its first chief transformation officer to focus on data-centricity, accuracy, and AI. “The processes and systems designed and deployed in concert with business expertise across the company have resulted in the company reaching and maintaining 99.8% data accuracy over the past two years,’’ Vincent says. “This work is critical and feeds directly into how the company uses AI.”

As Prologis leverages smart building technologies, Vincent is also working with Chief Technology Officer Sineesh Keshav to develop a digital infrastructure to enable and optimize real-time asset management.

“We are integrating energy, mobility, and sustainability solutions at our facilities, which can help provide data to optimize performance for our customers,” Vincent says.

She and Keshav are also looking at Prologis’ AI roadmap “from a strategy and process improvement perspective because repeatable business processes enabled by robust technology solutions and machine learning [are] key to our ability to make decisions and scale quickly,” she says.

CBTO: Blending technology with the business

Marc Sule was a “traditional CIO” who recently became chief business technology officer (CBTO) at Power Home Remodeling, a $1 billion exterior home remodeler. His title not only underscores the blend of business and technology at Power, but also an emerging trend that sees many IT organizations rebranding to better reflect their organizational responsibilities and impact.

“Although I loved my last role … there was a lack of a true ‘product’ focus and much of the strategy and direction came from outside the technology organization,’’ Sule says. He loves building and creating and was “looking for a change that would create more opportunity for influence in strategy and product development.”

Sule says he was impressed at how Tim Wenhold, Power’s chief operating officer and chief innovation officer, and the business technology team have demonstrated success utilizing technology to shape the business.

“There is a true partnership between the business and technology teams here [that] has been well-established for several years,’’ he says. “There is no ‘we’ or ‘they;’ it’s just ‘us, Power.’ A relationship like that is based on full transparency and trust.”

CDO: Modernizing the CIO role

When the CIO of Insight Enterprises left a year ago, company leadership decided to update the title and bring together the customer-facing and digital teams. Rob Green, who had come into the company in 2021 to modernize the e-commerce infrastructure, was appointed as its first chief digital officer.

The role not only recognizes the significant investments the company is making with its internal IT stack but also in the company’s digital engagement/e-commerce platforms.

“The work I was doing with those platforms, not surprisingly, was engaging with IT … so it made sense to bring teams together and get them focused on customers, partners, and teammates,’’ Green says.

The CIO role is focused on the IT infrastructure, information, and data, he says. “Given the work I was doing was predominantly on external digital platforms, in discussions with the leadership team, it felt like [CDO] was a more modern take on CIO” and there was no need to bring in a new CIO.

The CIO’s evolving role in the C-suite

With new technology leadership roles on the rise, and companies rethinking how they structure their C-suites to ensure proper prioritization of tech’s vitality to business, there is no question the CIO role is expanding, changing, and being refashioned. Staying relevant will depend on a CIO’s ability to adapt and hold on to core capabilities while bringing in other tech leaders to take on some of the increasing responsibilities that come with new technologies.

“The most influential CIOs will combine a keen ability to identify, understand, and implement emerging innovations while managing an expansive tech investment portfolio on the day-to-day operations side of the house,’’ says EY’s Sharma.

Much of this can and should be offloaded to trusted counterparts within and outside the organization, he says. “The most successful CIOs will work in tandem with other executive officers while maintaining ownership of the technology enterprise, including investment in emerging digital technologies to drive both revenue and organizational efficiencies.”