Too Fast, Too Furious? Why CIOs Need to Balance AI Innovation With Tech Fatigue

AI is helping companies churn out new technology at breakneck speeds. The growing challenge is making sure employees and customers can keep up.

For many organizations, the pace of frontier AI progress hasn’t translated into massive operational gains. The barriers are both technical and cultural. Instead of accelerating decision-making or improving experiences, AI is actually overwhelming some teams. Among software engineers, for example, tech fatigue was cited as the top cause of unhappiness on the job, according to Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey.

As AI adoption quickly expands beyond IT teams, CIOs have to consider not just the cost and quality of the solutions they’re building or buying, but the cadence with which they release them.

“You have to be mindful of what the impact to the organization is. Can they continue to move at that pace? At what point are they going to get technology fatigue?” said Tracy Koenig, CIO of Anderson Trucking Service, Inc. “It’s changing the role from providing solutions to asking more questions and having a better understanding of internal and external customers.”

Alongside serving in IT leadership roles for the past 20 years, Tracy was also CEO of TMI Communications, a telecom and networking services provider. The experience taught him about balancing IT ambitions with the rest of the organization’s priorities — and making sure new technology can be adopted by users to actually drive value.

“Within the role of a CIO, you always have insight into all the different departments and teams and customers, but you definitely get a different perspective,” said Tracy, who joined ATS in July. “In a CEO role, you understand there are only so many resources you can leverage to deploy technology — and you understand business fatigue.”

CIOnews talked to Tracy to discuss keeping technology fatigue at bay and rethinking the build-versus-buy equation.

Let Drivers Be Drivers

When IT leaders rush new technology into the hands of unprepared users, investments often fail to gain traction.

New applications, devices or systems could have all the necessary technical underpinnings yet deliver no measurable impact. Employees may resist changing their workflows or be unaware of how to fully utilize a specific tool. Depending on the technology, it could have unintended consequences that actually make their days more challenging.

The gap between AI adoption and impact emerges when IT teams make decisions for users instead of working with them to build or buy the right solutions for their business problems, Tracy said. To better target where they deploy AI for maximum impact, organizations like ATS are pushing technology and domain experts to work more closely together.

At ATS, Tracy’s team is focused on delivering technology that improves the experience for more than 1,000 drivers — from making it easier to get information through voice prompts instead of sitting on a service line, to anticipating maintenance needs based on future loads or optimizing routes based on real-time events.

The goal is to “allow our drivers to drive, not have to stress and worry about the technology,” Tracy said.

Ambitious Roadmap, Bite-Sized Progress

Just a few months in, Tracy is already staring down an ambitious IT roadmap.

But like other technology leaders, he’s also trying to navigate an environment where models are continually improving, new techniques are emerging constantly to help balance cost and performance, and what seemed impossible just last year becomes a passing reality.

For Tracy, it’s about both the journey and the destination. Having an end state in mind is important, but breaking down progress into tangible chunks helps make the overall task seem less daunting.

And when it comes to roadmaps, he’s adamant that CIOs now need to be flexible. The five-year plan is now a relic of the past. With the AI environment advancing so quickly, standalone tools or capabilities might become unnecessary or incorporated into other platforms. And new innovations could emerge that quickly take priority over existing investments.

“It truly is strategy, and balancing it with a focus on the next 18 to 36 months but being able to adapt and be nimble to changes that could happen within the next six months,” Tracy said.

Alongside automated coding tools, Tracy’s team has also explored how AI can automate back-end IT work, like integrations, to accelerate product development by making it easier to test out experimental concepts, among other early use cases.

Building The Future

Like other CIOs, Tracy is now re-evaluating the classic IT dilemma: Build technology in-house, or buy it off the shelf?

More companies are considering how they can use AI to build their own core applications to move off more limiting and expensive proprietary tools. In the past, building a commercial-grade CRM may have taken years. But when AI can help internal teams scale their own custom-built tools in months, the equation suddenly changes. Now, organizations like ATS can think about customized solutions across their businesses, even for “commodity” software.

“At some point, we’re not going to be able to sustain moving everything to the cloud,” Tracy said. “If it is a competitive advantage and unique to our organization, aligns with our culture and our family-owned values, we will take that in-house and build it out.”

To help tie these in-house developments directly to impact, Tracy’s team is working on a system that helps quickly forecast the cost of development for an application and the expected return over the next several years, balancing factors like the cost of hours to develop and ongoing investment.

“Even the commodity discussion needs to be looked at,” Tracy said. “Even though it's quick and easy to get into, you can find yourself two or three years down the road spending three times the cost.”

As AI continues to accelerate what technology teams can build, it’s now the CIO's responsibility to not just balance risk and benefits, but assess organizational readiness and take steps to close those gaps. While speed is important, CIOs like Tracy are making business priorities keep pace with technical change.