This also has implications for succession planning. The article points to a future CIO profile that is less defined by traditional infrastructure progression and more by fluency in data, enterprise problem-solving, and business communication. For boards and CEOs, that suggests rethinking the bench: high-potential leaders may increasingly come from data, digital product, customer platforms, or transformation roles rather than classic back-office IT paths alone.
There is a people and capacity issue underneath the AI narrative. CIOs are being asked to absorb new responsibilities in agent oversight, expectation management, and rapid education while still running core operations. That combination can shorten tenure and degrade decision quality if not addressed explicitly. Senior teams should ask whether they are funding AI governance and change leadership as real capabilities, or simply layering them onto existing roles.
- Who owns AI policy, use-case approval, and benefits tracking across the enterprise?
- Which future CIO candidates demonstrate data governance credibility and cross-functional influence?
- What metrics show whether AI is reducing workload versus increasing leadership strain and hidden cost?
How impactful is AI on CIOs? According to John Hamit, CIO at Altra Federal Credit Union: unprecedented.
“AI is probably the most significant technology disruption that we’ve faced as CIOs over the last 20 years,” said Hamit, who also serves as a member of the ISACA Emerging Trends Working Group.
The disruption extends beyond technology. After arriving at the CIO role through very different career paths, Hamit, Ruth Sleeter at Bentley Systems and Vishal Grover at Apexanalytix all said that AI has changed the day-to-day responsibilities of CIOs and is repaving the path that future IT leaders will take to reach the job.
AI is different from previous technology shifts because of how powerful it is. Grover pointed to just how much AI can automate and the skills people can attain by using AI tools. Disruption of this magnitude also comes with risk, they underscored.
CIOs have not only the potential efficiencies and innovation of AI, Hamit said. They also have to contend with issues like shadow AI, potential data loss and models with unintended bias.
The mission is the same, but the job is changing
The CIO has long been expected to combine technical expertise with business leadership, but AI is intensifying the demands of their job.
“The pace of change, especially as it relates to artificial intelligence and new technologies that many CIOs haven’t had exposure to up until recently, [has] changed how the job looks significantly,” Hamit said.
One challenge is that AI itself is changing so quickly. CIOs have to figure out how to govern it as it evolves and as their companies adopt and promote it to their customers. On top of that, AI introduces new expense management challenges.
“All of these costs associated with AI are adding up very quickly. I think a lot of organizations are being caught off guard by how much expense is going to these tools,” Hamit said.
CIOs can’t own enterprise AI alone
Because CIOs can’t handle everything that’s necessary to strategize, manage and optimize their enterprises’ fast-moving adoption of enterprise AI, the CIO job has become more collaborative in some ways, Sleeter said.
“The CIO’s job is not to own AI across the enterprise. That would be a mistake,” Sleeter argued. “You can’t centralize that function. But we have a phenomenal amount to do to build the infrastructure and the platforms and the technology to unlock and unleash potential across our companies.”
AI makes the CIO job a people challenge
For CIOs, AI is just as much a people challenge as it is a technology challenge. Figuring out the human element is currently a big part of the job.
“It’s a tall leadership challenge right now. It’s very fun to think about, but figuring out the culture that you want to build and continuing to keep a psychologically safe culture where people can innovate at an incredibly fast pace at the same time as taking them through all of this change is hard,” Sleeter said.
Technology changes. Day-to-day responsibilities change. Reporting structures change. But if you zoom out, the function of the CIO role remains the same, according to Grover, CIO of Apexanalytix.
“You still have to invest time in understanding your clients, your company, everyone’s needs,” Grover said. “Overall, those fundamentals are still the same. They have not changed.”
What CIOs are spending more time on is managing expectations around AI.
“You have to keep explaining it to the end user, to the clients: How we are doing it, what’s the advantage, what benefit you will get,” Grover said. “You have to explain it in their own business terms.”
How AI could redefine CIO careers
CIOs tend to be curious people who like to be challenged, and today’s environment certainly delivers on that front.
“There is no boredom right now, which is usually what propels me to go think about doing something else,” Sleeter shared.
Likewise, Hamit and Grover shared that they aren’t planning any imminent title changes.
They ventured that in terms of formal job changes, CIOs might also settle into a new C-suite role: the chief AI officer. IBM surveyed 2,000 CEOs for its 2026 Rewiring the C-Suite report and found that 76% of organizations have a chief AI officer, up from 26% in 2025. With CIOs dedicating so much of their time to learning about and implementing AI, the CAIO role could be a natural progression for them.
“There is going to be a segment of CIOs that I think would really enjoy and would try to pursue the chief AI officer role. But I think that’s going to take some initiative on their part to become educated,” Hamit said.
He added that he expects CIOs at smaller companies to continue to wear many hats, absorbing responsibilities that might belong to a dedicated CAIO in a larger enterprise.
While that job title is popping up more, some CIOs, like Sleeter, are skeptical of what the role actually entails.
“I worry a little bit about a chief AI officer at a company because I’m not sure what that means,” Sleeter said. “I’m not sure what that role really would be. It almost feels too narrowly scoped.”
AI could shorten CIO tenures
Excitement about the possibilities of a new role isn’t the only thing that could push CIOs to take on a new position. The speed at which CIOs must learn about AI’s rapidly changing capabilities and the pressure they face to deliver value on the technology could fuel burnout.
“AI burnout for high performers can be a real thing. It’s something that I watch in my own organization. And … personally, I watch for it very, very carefully,” Sleeter shared.
Indeed, the average tenure of CIOs is three to five years, and that appears to be shrinking, according to ComputerWeekly reporting.
“It seems like CIOs are jumping around a little bit more,” Hamit said. “That might be due to a multitude of factors. Maybe they’re looking for a different type of challenge, or maybe it’s not the right fit as an organization.”
In 2020, the average age of CIOs across all industries was 55, according to research from Korn Ferry. Seasoned CIOs may be invigorated by the demands of AI implementation, security, governance and all of the other IT strategy responsibilities that come with their role. But some might see today’s pace of technology change as a good reason to step aside and retire.
“There might be CIOs that are maybe on the tail end, and they just don’t have the drive or the initiative to learn what they need, what they would need to learn to manage AI effectively,” Hamit said.
Ruth Sleeter, CIO, Bentley Systems
CIOs will manage a blended workforce
In Hamit’s view, the modern CIO is moving into an era of “blended workforce management,” he said.
“We’re accomplishing tasks now through not only humans, but now we’ve got this entire digital workforce. That’s a whole new realm of things that a CIO needs to be concerned with,” he said, noting that CIOs need to be asking questions, for example, about how much autonomy the agents in their digital workforce have and what happens if these agents behave unexpectedly.
The path to the CIO job
The road to becoming a CIO doesn’t look the same for everyone. “What’s interesting about the CIO role is that people come from all different backgrounds,” Sleeter said.
Grover, Sleeter and Hamit’s own careers illustrate that point.
Grover followed one path. He started his career in IT by dabbling in programming before moving into database work. He joined Apexanalytix in 2013 as a database consultant and over the next decade worked his way up to the CIO role at the company.
Sleeter’s route was different. She began as a software developer, cutting her teeth in product development, and later crossed into enterprise IT, becoming CIO at Deutsche Bank and later Lenovo, Sonos, Axon and now Bentley Systems.
Hamit’s path was different again. He began on the help desk at a Wisconsin healthcare provider, working 12-hour day and night shifts while attending school. He later joined Kaplan’s help desk, steadily working his way up to vice president of infrastructure, security and support before becoming CIO at Altra Federal Credit Union in 2016.
The traditional path to CIO is changing
But while today’s CIOs have arrived through different routes, the pressing question is whether those routes will prepare tomorrow’s IT leaders. Over the course of these CIOs’ careers, technology and the job have changed significantly
Hamit said he believes some of the traditional career paths that once produced successful CIOs will become less common.
“Do I think somebody could progress into a CIO in a similar fashion to the way that I did?” he said. “There are going to be those times where somebody does advance in that way. But I also think that you’re probably going to have CIOs coming from a multitude of different areas within the business, whether they’re supporting the external-facing digital side of the business or other facets of technology.”
One area that might produce a future CIO? Data.
“There’s a huge connection between data and AI because of data governance. Everybody is finding that’s having a huge impact on our ability to deploy AI,” Hamit said.
As enterprise AI adoption continues, CIOs will likely move further away from behind-the-scenes technical work. Instead, CIOs of the future will need to be strong communicators focused on forming relationships within a business.
If Hamit were hiring a first-time CIO in the coming years, he would want to know that person could figure out an enterprise’s pain points and identify where AI could have the most impact.
Predicting how AI will reshape enterprise operations — and the CIO role — is far from an exact science. But Grover said he believes the job will ultimately be about how well CIOs solve problems with the help of AI.
“If you look at senior leaders, all of us, what we are doing is solving a problem. The way we used to solve problems versus today and the future will be very different,” Grover said. “There is no way a human can compete against a person using AI effectively.”
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