
2026 CIO Benchmark Report
Where CIOs stand on AI, budgets, influence, and more.

Latest News

Enterprise AI
Agentic AI News & Strategy for Technology Leaders
Agentic AI News & Strategy for Technology Leaders

Lem Prestage, Group IT Manager at Southbase Group, on how a voice AI agent and orchestration across 70-plus SaaS platforms turned slow, low-quality safety reporting into fast field-level data.

Global CTO and AI Officer, Vishal Vallabha, explains why private equity gets AI returns only after the data underneath is connected, not from a dashboard sitting on top.

Surya Jayanti, Director of Software Engineering at Walmart Global Tech, on running separate delivery lanes for professional engineers and frontline vibe coders, and why the semantic layer will outlast any model.

José Freitas, Lead Enterprise Architect at IATA, on why architecture tools can reveal a company’s weak points, but they can’t resolve its ownership problem.

Rob Spellman, CIO of Leidos QTC Health Services, on judging AI by what it makes his teams capable of, treating faster growth as the goal and cost savings as a side effect.

Kenneth Burdine, Deputy CIO of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, described how treating AI as a force multiplier for proactive operations rather than a novelty technology helped KCTCS compress a network deployment.

The AI bill is coming for everyone. CIO Mastermind founder Scott Smeester explains how technology leaders can avoid getting caught flat-footed.

Jason Andrews, VP of Strategy and Planning for Engineering Operations at Cisco, on why platform migrations work best when teams leave process debt behind.

Sergey Sergeyev, VP of EA and Chief AI Architect, on why vibe-coded replacements are pulling the foundation out from under the enterprise.

Ashish Kulkarni, Principal Enterprise Architect on how frontier models have converged enough that the sole differentiation in enterprise AI is orchestration, governance, and surrounding data quality.
Opinion
CIO Commentary, Expert Analysis & IT Leadership Perspectives
CIO Commentary, Expert Analysis & IT Leadership Perspectives

The real cost of not canceling anything

The Complex Costs of AI No One Is Budgeting For
Leadership
CIO Strategy, Digital Transformation & IT Executive Insights
CIO Strategy, Digital Transformation & IT Executive Insights

For Andrea Markstrom, success comes down to three core tenets: Starting with the user, building the right team, and connecting with both internal and external networks.

Scott Smeester argues roadmap inflation isn't a prioritization problem. It's a missing decision, and CIOs need a kill list to fix it.

Jason James shares five rules for surviving M&A data room review, from indexing documents to spotting change-of-control clauses before they cost you.

A 25-year veteran of the technology industry, Intel CIO Cindy Stoddard talked to CIOnews about the importance of IT basics, why technology modernization starts with process, and building a culture to power the company of the future.

Jason Cohen, founder and CEO of Right Stack Advisors, on the preflight inspection AI programs keep skipping and the scorecard that gives every initiative a named owner.

From the Edge to the Core:
Bringing Agentic AI to the Heart of the Enterprise.

Security, Governance, Risk
AI Governance, Cybersecurity & Enterprise Risk News
AI Governance, Cybersecurity & Enterprise Risk News

Gregory Baran, Deputy CIO at Tenable, reflected on a year of building and managing 36 personal AI agents to argue that enterprise trust in agentic AI must be enforced through architectural controls and identity layers, not written governance policy.

A rising trend says companies should record every meeting, call, and interaction. The legal, security, and compliance risks are real.

Ajay Paul, Chief Sales Officer at IT consultancy SIMARN Solutions, on the risks of deploying agentic systems before establishing the governance, data architecture, and accountability structures.
Leo Simonovich, VP of Industrial Cyber at Siemens Energy, on securing data center environments where the threat surface extends from the rack to the turbine.
Sandeep Shilawat, Hybrid Cloud CTO Lead, & AI/Automation Leader at IBM, on how agentic attacks are already operational and enterprises need to step up their continuous architectural enforcement.
Industry News
Enterprise Technology Trends, IT Vendor News & CIO Moves
Enterprise Technology Trends, IT Vendor News & CIO Moves

Quantum computers will break the encryption protecting banking and government secrets—and "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks are already underway. Why CIOs and CISOs must act now.

AI Has Collapsed Code Writing And Moved The Cost To Specification And Review
Kapil Viren Ahuja, Partner and CTO of Digital at Nagarro, explained how AI code generation pushed engineering into specification and review, and how a custom harness, and role-based agents rebuilt trust at enterprise scale.

The Complex Costs of AI No One Is Budgeting For
Ann Dunkin breaks down AI's true costs: trillions in infrastructure spending, soaring energy and water use straining the grid, and job disruption from AI investment and layoffs. Hidden costs, she argues, are unmanaged costs.

A Hitachi Vantara report found enterprises are wasting an estimated $108 billion annually on AI because poor data infrastructure undermines their return on investment.

The European Commission launched formal proceedings to compel Google to share its AI and search data with competitors under the Digital Markets Act.

A new report from Pearson finds that AI could add $6.6 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2034 if businesses invest in upskilling their workforce.

A new survey reveals widespread use of unvetted "shadow AI" by healthcare workers, creating significant risks for patient safety and data privacy.

















