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
After spending the past decade eliminating legacy systems and rebuilding the technology stack, New York Life Group Benefit Solutions (GBS) CIO Matt Marze and team were prepared when the AI mandate came.
Sai Krishna Cheemakurthi, VP and Lead Infrastructure Architect for Enterprise Observability at U.S. Bank, on why the next architectural layer enterprises need is an AI control plane that turns observability into governed action.
Eli Potter argues RevOps AI agents get worse with more CRM data unless paired with a 'context graph'—a narrow set of live deal facts assembled at decision time, distinct from the stable knowledge graph most teams mistake for the full solution.
Divya Rathanlal, CIO of Austin Water, on reframing digital transformation from an IT project into a service design challenge built on trust.
Armel Roméo Kouassi, SVP and Global Head of Asset Liability Management at Northern Trust, on keeping accountability workable as AI output grows.
Todd Pugh, fractional CIO and former CIO of CSAA Insurance Group, on why enterprise AI failures usually expose broken business logic rather than broken technology.
Massimo Pezzini breaks down the three pillars of AI agent orchestration and why skipping a strategy leads to costly "spaghetti" sprawl.
THE CRUX Founding Partner Curtis Kim on why any technical model that works still has to prove it deserves a place across the enterprise.
Sandeep Shilawat, Hybrid Cloud CTO at IBM, on why controlling runaway AI spending takes FinOps discipline and AI-powered tools that track the bill in real time.
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.
Opinion
CIO Commentary, Expert Analysis & IT Leadership Perspectives
CIO Commentary, Expert Analysis & IT Leadership Perspectives
Why More CRM Data Makes Your RevOps Agent Worse
The Real Cost of Not Canceling Anything
Leadership
CIO Strategy, Digital Transformation & IT Executive Insights
CIO Strategy, Digital Transformation & IT Executive Insights
Inundated with AI marketing and anxious to keep a lid on IT spend, CEOs and other business leaders are increasingly looking to the CIO for guidance on which technology will help drive the most value.
Veteran technology executive CIO Michael Spires on the evolving role of CIO as translator and orchestrator, aligning people, processes, and technology around shared business outcomes.
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.
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
Claudionor Coelho, Senior Fellow for AI at Majestic Labs, on the renewal rate companies won't admit and why the data and connections a demo skips decide whether agents survive.
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.
AI Needs Strong Governance, Not Blind Trust
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
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.
Missing AI ROI Traces Back To Ungoverned Value Adoption And Decisions
Dr. Elena Alikhachkina, board director, founder of InfoFluence.ai, and author of AI Oversight, on how enterprises drowning in technical AI controls have left value, adoption, and decisions ungoverned, and what it means for ROI.
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.
'Harvest Now, Decrypt Later': The Quantum Threat CISOs Can't Wait Out
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.
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.
Most Popular
From the Edge to the Core:
Bringing Agentic AI to the Heart of the Enterprise.
