The CIO AI Agenda - circa 2026

While much attention is drawn to Chief AI Officers, when it comes to AI, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) may have the hardest job today. Digital transformation has created intense pressures where they have to balance investing in new technologies and opportunities while keeping the essential, often aging, mission critical systems operating. Now AI has amplified that pressure immensely. Mission operators are clamoring for AI solutions and the entire workforce sees the power of AI and is asking for it. But challenges and risks are significant in privacy, security, skills, infrastructure, and budget all come into play.

Photo: Rob O’Keefe

CIOs can adopt a three timescale planning approach looking at 6 months, 18 months, and 36 months to inform priorities, initiatives, and budget cycles. Of course in all time frames, policy and security are paramount. Here are some representative topics by timeframe:

  • 6 Months - focus on employee skills, productivity, reinvigorating data governance, tailor ongoing initiatives to AI themes, experimentation

  • 18 months - use of technology in solution building, tailoring in house custom models, creating new and revised career paths, defining responsible use for agentic AI, defining mission processes for automation readiness

  • 36 months - workforce realignment, open agent framework, legacy system replacement with data stores and agents, home grown LLMs tuned to mission

Every CIO has to tailor the agenda to their agency and mission needs. It will be interesting to see how roles and responsibilities evolve. We will have "human in the loop" for many years, where AI takes care of repetitive work and the workforce applies its expertise, nuance, and wisdom towards defining a generation of agents to support the mission and stakeholders.

(no AI was used in writing this article)

AIRob O'KeefeComment