To succeed today, CIOs must be strategic partners. It’s no longer something to work toward achieving.
“What used to be an aspiration, having a seat at the table, that’s now needed,” says George Westerman, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder of the Global Opportunity Forum, and co-chair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award. “AI has made it more important for the CIO to be able to exercise influence and give advice, because now you have a major technology that every C-suite person is wondering about and feels they need to use, and, given its transformative nature throughout the organization, this is where the skills of a CIO who is a strategic partner can be really useful.”
That, though, may not be enough for CIOs in the future.
The CIOs of tomorrow will be crafting the vision of what is possible for the organization, advising their C-suite colleagues on integrating agents into their teams, and navigating high-pressure situations, says Westerman and other IT leaders.
That will require even more of the CIO.
To deliver on such expectations and ensure career longevity, CIOs and executive advisers cite these nine strategies for future-proofing IT leaders’ careers.
1. Cultivate a transformational mindset
CIOs going forward must have “the willingness to look at the situation and think about what’s better,” Westerman says, explaining that this goes beyond improving how existing processes operate to remaking and transforming the organization into something new.
To achieve that, CIOs of the future will need to be visionary and adaptable, with the decisiveness to pivot quickly and the ability to “convince other people to come with you,” Westerman says. IT executives who have or who cultivate those traits now will be “ready for whatever tomorrow brings,” he adds
He and others note that some CIOs are already demonstrating these capabilities, for example, by developing a deep understanding of AI so they reimagine what’s possible for their organizations and remake their IT infrastructure and teams to deliver that envisioned future state.
What CIOs need to provide in the future is “the vision, the innovative ideas, the bold execution, the willingness to take calculated risks, the humility to admit when an idea isn’t working and to pivot, and the ability to leverage a team of talented coworkers who all are critical to the success of the business,” adds Keri Pearlson, senior lecturer and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School and founding president of the Austin Society for Information Management (SIM). “That’s what CIOs need today and, in the future, to be the leaders we need them to be.”
2. Translate IT into business value
CIOs now and in the future will have to show that they’re not only visionaries but that their visions deliver value to the organization, says Peter Kreutter, WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management’s CIO Leadership Excellence Program faculty director and a member of the board of trustees for CIO Stiftung.
“CIOs have to be much more on the business side, know the business model, and translate IT into added value,” he says. “You want to be a CIO who can co-create with the business, not one who talks about the AI models.”
3. Develop an understanding of business risk
CIOs must also identify and communicate any business trade-offs or risks associated with their IT vision, choices, and agenda. Some IT leaders are doing that now, but the call for CIOs to be business risk stakeholders will only get louder in the coming years.
“CIOs need to demonstrate they understand the potential as well as the risk not from a technology side but from the business side,” Kreutter says.
Executive coach Lacey Leone McLaughlin, president and founder of LLM Consulting Group and host of the podcast “Unfolding Leadership,” shares that perspective.
“As technology becomes more capable and accessible, the differentiator for CIOs will increasingly be judgment: knowing where technology can create real value, where it introduces risk, what should change, what shouldn’t, and how quickly an organization can realistically absorb that change,” she explains.
4. Embrace the technologist persona
In recent years some questioned whether IT chiefs really needed a technology background, but experts now say it’s clear that modern CIOs do indeed need to be well versed in technology — particularly AI.
“We’re figuring out how AI will change how we live and work, but AI is just the latest revolution in technology. There was the internet, then the move to cloud, now AI. There will always be new tools, and we [CIOs] need to know how these things work, so we can inform others on how to use the tools,” says Matt Richard, CIO of Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).
To do that, Richard commits to learning about emerging technologies and “what they can do, how they’ll impact jobs, how they’re going to change how teams do work, how to implement them, how to find partners, how to manage expectations, and how to make sure we have security and guardrails.”
He takes sales calls from vendors and schedules demos, admitting he does so specifically to learn, not to buy.
And he still plays around with tech, breaking it and putting it back together, so to speak, to test its limits — a pastime many CIOs share.
“That’s important to do now and in the future. CIOs should be getting into the sandbox and trying to build things as the technology comes out,” Richard adds.
5. Drive change with agility, speed, and empathy
Many CIOs have embraced the change agent aspects of their jobs. But that is not enough in at a time when new technologies evolve at an ever-increasing pace, the impacts of that are significant, and fears of job loss and displacement are high.
“It can be an exciting time or a fearful time, but the CIOs who future-proof their careers are working on how they communicate around that, and how they show up and lead,” Leone McLaughlin says.
To be effective leaders now and tomorrow, Leone McLaughlin says CIOs must “communicate it in a way that excites versus elicits fear. They need to say, ‘We’ve gone through changes before; it just has to happen more often and faster, and [this new technology] will help us get smarter, help us do jobs better, help you spend time on tasks that really matter.’”
IT leaders must embody that mindset, too, she says. They need to have — or develop — agility. They must also embrace new technologies, adjust as technologies and markets change, and pivot without fear.
“They need to adapt and adjust to the changes coming, which are coming faster,” she adds. “A larger amount of adaptability is required today, and CIOs should be asking, ‘Am I adaptable enough?’”
6. Create an IT org where agents and humans work together
Pal Narayanan, chief digital and information officer at Kenco Group, a large third-party logistics provider, agrees that the CIO role will be redefined over the next few years. He also believes that all IT jobs will be remade because of agentic AI.
As a result, CIOs will need to lead and manage teams comprised of people and agents — and they’ll need to know how to train and hire staffers and leaders capable of working alongside agents, too.
This will require CIOs to partner with the HR department to revise how IT jobs are structured and how the department is organized. It will also require CIOs to be highly skilled in governance and accountability, as they’ll need policies and procedures to enforce governance as their workforce transitions to a hybrid of humans and agentic AI.
7. Prepare C-suite colleagues to manage agentic-human hybrid teams, too
Savio Lobo, CIO of IT services provider Ensono, expects CIOs will guide their business colleagues in how to manage an agentic-human hybrid workforce.
“As AI agents take on more work, CIOs will need to encourage business leaders to think about how people and agents will work together: which tasks an agent can handle, where a person needs to exercise judgment, and who is accountable for the result,” Lobo says.
To be ready to do so, Lobo says CIOs should be working toward clear identity, permissions, data access, security, and audit trails so they give teams the confidence to move faster.
“Equally important to getting the tech right, CIOs and tech leaders must explain how and why changes are needed with employee-level context, and help them build the skills to work differently,” he adds.
8. Lean into curiosity and continuous learning
Quantum computing is on the horizon, and there’s always the possibility that artificial general intelligence becomes real. As such, CIOs say it’s critical to not become complacent or wedded to the technologies they embrace today, because history shows us nearly all technologies become obsolete someday.
“CIOs can’t afford to be stuck in what worked in the past,” Leone McLaughlin says. “So CIOs have to be curious, ask the right questions, listen, learn, and hire people smarter than they are.”
Lobo agrees, saying that the arrival of other disruptive technologies is inevitable. “Today it’s AI; tomorrow it’s something else,” he says.
He’s focusing on learning what that “something else” will be by leaning into briefings, partner engagements, and public forums where people are speculating about what’s next.
He expects his direct reports and others on his IT team to do the same, and he works to cultivate a “really good culture of learners” through formal training and development programs.
9. Improve your leadership abilities
CIOs who want to continue working on what matters next need to demonstrate exemplary leadership capabilities now. “We are at another inflection point for the skill set and role of a CIO today,” Pearlson says.
Westerman believes many CIOs have work to do here, as they to date have advanced their careers more due to their tech talent than their management and executive skills. As a result, CIOs often have more work to do to sharpen those skills than others in the C-suite.
CIOs have plenty of opportunities to improve; they just have to be intentional, Westerman says, noting that tried-and-true leadership development strategies continue to work.
Develop relationships, deliver on promised expectations, seek feedback on how to do better, and then find ways to improve. “CIOs should be asking themselves, ‘Am I getting enough feedback? Am I effective in my environment?’” he adds.
Similarly, Kreutter advises existing and would-be CIOs to seek what he calls “heat experiences” — tasks or projects that come with a lot of pressure — so they’re well prepared for a future that will likely have more high-pressure situations for CIOs than it does today.
“You need to train and do sparring,” he explains. “Building up this experience is crucial.”
So volunteer to enter the fray, and step forward to lead through a crisis. “They’re opportunities to learn and show that you can demonstrate leadership,” he adds.