CIOs entered the year with ambitions to bring more AI into their companies and start using AI to transform how work gets done. At the same time they also wanted to leverage tech to cut costs and boost productivity throughout the business. And they hoped to use their post to help drive the strategic vision for their organizations.
Now into the fourth quarter, CIOs say they’re still pursuing those objectives and plenty more. They say they still have much work to do, and they’re aiming to close the year with wins in myriad areas.
Here, IT leaders share advice on what their peers should focus on based on what they are racing to finish before year’s end.
1. Be good to your word
One of the top to-do items for many CIOs as they near year’s end is delivering on their promises.
As Robert Field, global CIO at tech advisory firm Adler Advisors, says, people may not remember all the work IT did in any given year, “but they’ll always remember the things you didn’t do that you said you would.”
Field also cites fiscal reasons for his drive to finish up all IT work planned for 2026, noting that the company, which runs on a calendar year, has already allocated the money for the work in its annual budget and has pegged some of it to anticipated tax credits.
Moreover, employees’ performance reviews are done on the calendar year, he says, which means planned projects need to be completed so leaders can accurately assess employees’ work and contributions.
Jason Brucker, managing director for CIO solutions at consulting firm Protiviti, says every year around this time he hears from many CIOs who are looking to finish what they started. But it can be a hard-fought win, he says. End-of-year tasks are piling up on workers, teams are starting to take time to plan for the upcoming year, and the C-suite is stressing the need for IT to deliver measurable value to the business.
Still, despite the distractions, closing the books on promises made can help prove the value of IT’s ability to not only deliver solutions but make good on allotted investments — an important win for securing funding for the next slate of projects.
2. Prove this year’s solutions deliver when it matters most
The last months of the year are always the busiest for Kenco Group, which as a large third-party logistics provider experiences a spike in demand for its services. Pal Narayanan, its chief digital and information officer, wants to use that peak volume to make clear that his IT department has no problem keeping operations up and running smoothly even at full tilt.
Although demonstrating IT’s ability to keep pace with the business is always critical, Narayanan says he wants a win this upcoming busy season because IT has added more automation and robotics within company processes “and we want to make sure those work flawlessly.”
But his IT team needs to be prepared to work quickly if there are any issues that need to be addressed, as Narayanan notes that this is the first peak season the company will go through with the new technology in place. “Every minute matters during peak season, so I’m making sure everyone is in place, and everything is built for scale, and if any additional capability needs to be turned on, our vendors are ready,” he adds.
3. Fortify business alignment for the year ahead
For Adler Advisors’ Field, building relationships with colleagues is an ongoing task. But year-end provides a ripe opportunity to check in with his peers, tie IT work to hoped-for business outcomes, and discuss goals for the upcoming year, he says.
“I use this time to talk to people and to meet up and align IT with their strategic plans for next year, so my team is aligned to achieve that with them,” he says.
Field is disciplined in his outreach, as he keeps track of meetings and his colleagues’ preferred communication modes. He has had workers on his own IT team also work on building relationships with their business counterparts to ensure those team members understood the business and how IT could provide “exponential value” to it.
And while Field meets with leaders in the business all year, he uses the fourth-quarter meetings to reflect on IT’s performance and solicit feedback on how it could do better and be more impactful. “It’s an opportunity to hear where they need me or my department to lean in on more, so we can deliver what they need,” he adds. “Inevitably there’s something I wasn’t thinking about.”
4. Advance the AI agenda
Many CIOs are looking for AI wins to close out the year, says Brucker of his client work for Protiviti. Today that means not just deploying AI capabilities but “rolling out AI to gain value.”
“They’re looking to go from the experimentation phase to the business value realization phase,” he says, noting that how they plan to do that varies from one organization to the next.
Kenco Group’s Narayanan hopes to accelerate his company’s AI strategy and plans to use the rest of this year to position his IT department to deliver on that. He’s currently identifying what is working and what is not so that IT can focus on what’s bringing success and shed what isn’t. To deliver on his goal before year-end, Narayanan is also establishing partnerships with new vendors — both nimble startups and mature, established providers — to bring a combination of agility, innovation, and experience. He’s implementing AI training and education to build competency and excitement, and he’s putting in financial metrics that can be used to measure the ROI on new AI initiatives. He believes doing this work now will allow for faster selection and adoption of AI in 2027 as well as faster achievement of benefits.
Meanwhile, Zach LaValley, CTO of RapidSOS, an intelligent safety platform and public safety AI company, is creating what he calls an “internal intelligence plane that everybody — humans and AI — can tap into.”
LaValley, who oversees internal IT at the company, envisions this replacing the data silos that limit AI use in organizations, with the plane having the needed security protections, access controls, and integration points that would allow AI applications to quickly and easily connect with it. LaValley says by year’s end he wants to connect all the data sources to this new plane. For additional 2026 wins, he wants to port over all the AI apps built by employees and start making those discoverable so that employees won’t have to reinvent apps that already exist.
Nina Tatsiy, CIO of Quadient, a global automation platform, wants to spend the next two months convincing everyone in the company “to embrace agentic AI.” She’ll consider it a win if she can accomplish that.
Along with that, Tatsiy wants to technically ready the organization for agentic AI transformation. “My biggest focus is how to set up an operating model for agents, governance for agents, and building a strategy around what that means for the rest of the technology stack,” she says.
5. Rein in AI costs
Like many IT execs, Sebastian Arriada, CIO of Globant, a global technology and IT services company, is seeing the cost of using AI spike as the number of “tokens we consume at the company grow almost exponentially.”
So, with an eye on reducing those bills, Arriada’s infrastructure team implemented Nvidia boxes so that Globant can deploy open-source models on them. Arriada explains that the move will let Globant balance the use of tokens between commercial and (less costly) open-source AI models.
There’s more work to be done before the boxes are operational, Arriada says. His goal is to have them up and running as well as expand the use of the open-source models by 5X this year. He expects to hit that goal by the end of November, noting that he wants to deliver another 5X in increased capacity in 2027.
Not all CIOs are ready to make the leap to hosting their own open weight models on expensive Nvidia hardware, but eyes on AI costs is common theme. Finishing out the year with a battle-tested plan for reining in AI spend is a worthy win regardless of how it’s executed.
6. Devise a 2027 budget for maximum impact and future-proof potential
Research firm Gartner projects that IT budgets will grow by an average of 3.7% in 2027 but cautions that, accounting for inflation, that increase will be marginal for most CIOs.
Actual budget figures for next year vary (and are not publicly disclosed), but CIOs of every stripe say one of the last wins they want for 2026 is to lock in an IT budget for 2027 that can maximize impact while keeping the price tag down.
It’s a task that “comes with a lot of pressure,” Adler Advisors’ Field admits. He expects to draft multiple iterations of his 2027 budget this fall, working with his IT team and consulting with business counterparts to come up with figures capable of supporting all of IT’s necessary run, grow, and transform costs — without breaking the bank. He’ll consider it a win when the budget is not just done but accepted by the board.
Quadient’s Tatsiy has a similar objective as she looks ahead for IT, saying she’s working “to transform all the functions I’m managing, not just for cost savings but to future-proof them.”
She says she’s looking at what she can rationalize and where she can deploy agentic AI to “change my function to be less focused on run and more focused on investing in the future.” Like Field, she says devising a 2027 budget that moves her further along that path would be a laudable way to close out the current year.