As corporate boards demand return on technology investments, Chief Information Officers are shifting focus toward several core business initiatives. According to the 2026 State of the CIO Study from CIO.com / Foundry, accelerating AI-driven innovation is the top business initiative driving IT investments this year at 39%, followed by increasing operational efficiency (32%), increasing cybersecurity protections (32%), and improving profitability (31%).
The role of the modern IT leader has mutated.
Driving Governed AI Innovation with Measurable ROI
Artificial intelligence adoption remains the No. 1 priority for IT leaders, but there is a demand for ROI. Organizations seek to implement AI in a governed and responsible way to ensure it delivers returns.
Thomas Phelps, CIO at Esri and Innovate@UCLA chief strategist, pursues AI initiatives that analyses show will drive top-line revenue growth, optimize costs, improve margins, deliver exceptional customer or employee experience, enable world-class operations, and/or enhance security. Esri applies AI to contract lifecycle management, using it to review contracts to determine which are standard and which “need that heavy human touch.”
At healthcare company DaVita, CIO Madhu Narasimhan directs AI capabilities into custom-built electronic medical records systems. DaVita implemented Glean as an enterprise work AI and search platform to make searching, retrieving, and summarizing medical, insurance, and administrative data easier and faster for employees, while deploying ambient listening capabilities and AI models to identify patients at risk of missing treatments schedules.
Meanwhile, Esri uses AI in the sales process to maintain a holistic view on how the organization is supporting a customer, according to Phelps.
Scaling Enterprise AI Adoption and Managing Change
Technology deployment fails if employees refuse to use it. Enterprise AI faces a unique change management challenge, requiring targeted training programs.
Steve Januario, CIO at financial operations platform maker BILL, notes that his team encourages people to have an AI-first mentality. Employees are told that if there’s a task they’ve done twice, they should think about automating it the third time. BILL utilizes dashboards to show employee use of deployed AI tools, shifting focus from whether they were using the products to how they’re using them.
“Almost everything we’re doing right now is hyperfocused on AI, getting the most from it, and making sure we keep it under control,” Januario explains.
Phelps collaborates with business leaders to identify manual tasks they’d like to shed using AI, which helps get adoption and create champions of AI use.
Laying the Technical Foundation for the Agentic Enterprise
Moving toward a future where agents work alongside humans requires architectural forethought. Brian Conneen, CIO of Finance of America, created an AI strategy and built an IT platform for AI deployments to ensure initiatives align to business strategy and prevent the company from ending up with numerous separate AI services.
Conneen emphasizes that a strategy and platform alone are insufficient. Workers must learn to lean into using agents and trust that AI can successfully perform tasks. Overcoming the belief that “Only I can do this work” remains a focus for Conneen.
Re-Engineering Workflows Before Deploying Code
CIOs remain committed to process improvements to gain value from AI initiatives and boost workplace efficiency and productivity. Research from Gartner indicates that 63% of CIOs list improving processes as a goal when operationalizing AI.
Phelps works with business counterparts at Esri to determine what is needed to get to a desired future state. In many cases, the process-improvement consultants in his IT department’s enterprise architecture team find they can improve the process without implementing new technology, instead adjusting workflows and how existing technology is used.
Modernizing the Tech Stack to Eradicate Technical Debt
Modernization remains a top IT initiative to improve efficiency, productivity, and user experience, as well as enable AI innovation and cybersecurity improvements. Deanna Towne, CIO at nonprofit Contexture, managed a consolidation merging three health information exchanges into a single platform. The migration required implementing data standards to ensure patient information is accurate and readily usable by clinicians.
Towne builds continuous service improvement into how the organization operates to prevent tech debt. Maintaining this discipline allows the organization to focus on cybersecurity and ensure necessary controls are in place.
Executing Business Transformations and Readiness Programs
For some enterprises, IT investments target driving business outcomes.
Remaking IT Infrastructure for Small Agents and Apps
The shift toward decentralized software components requires a reimagining of the pipeline.
As CIOs seek to transform IT into a business value–driven organization, they balance immediate cybersecurity hardening with disciplined AI scaling to drive business outcomes.
