To what extent do you think Generative AI will diminish the CIO role?

GenAI is undeniably reshaping the CIO role, but rather than diminishing its importance, it is elevating the CIO’s strategic influence as a critical driver of innovation, ethics, and business transformation.CIOs who lean into strategic oversight of AI ethics, data integrity, and business alignment will cement their position as essential architects of competitive advantage. The role is being amplified as the nexus of technology and enterprise strategy.

Perhaps I will be a little more provocative :)

I feel that the advent of Generative & Agentic AI is going to fundamentally challenge the traditional role that IT and the CIO have played in organisations. It will force us to rethink how we deliver and enable capability within our business, where traditional enterprise-style approaches will no longer cut it. It is going to truly enable the notion of the 'citizen-developer' where solutions and services can be built for the individual. It is going to change the way that human’s interface and interact with technology at all levels. It is going to significantly challenge traditional structures and architectural constructs that have been the foundation for everything we have done to date, and present new governance and risk challenges that we have not had to contend with before.

This is not to say that we are going to throw all the good that we have done to date out. In actual fact, those organisations with the most evolved and mature technical and architectural foundations will always be best placed to take advantage of these latest innovations. But I feel we are facing into profound change that is going to challenge how we think and act and how we solve problems, where exponential speed is the expected norm, where our businesses will be impatient and no longer accept the more traditional IT problem solving approaches and the associated timeframes that come with that. And how we think about and construct systems in the future will be radically different to what we have now. It is exciting and somewhat daunting at the same time.

This feels very similar to the digital transformation meme that did the rounds during covid. Covid had no bearing on digital transformation, it's impact was on digital adoption. 

GenAI is going to be the same. It won't disrupt the CIO role in any major way - what it will disruption is how the business uses technology to solve problems. 

Gen AI is not some magic bullet that can be switched on and the world will be at peace - it needs to be configured, secured, trained, hosted, protected. And that's where the role of the CIO will be relevant. 

My prediction is that the CIO will shift more to a facilitator of outcomes than an owner of systems.

The CIO is dead! Long live the CIO!

But this evolution is not specifically about GenAI. The traditional model of IT as a service function that manages infrastructure and is the architectural gatekeeper is already obsolete.
Today we are trying to manage a highly dynamic, business-embedded technology and business process leadership that must navigate an increasingly complex technology stack. The "stack" that Gartner has this year dubbed "the sandwich."

The sandwich IT model is a world where foundational enterprise systems at the bottom must integrate seamlessly with rapidly evolving AI-driven applications at the top, all while middleware, APIs, and automation tools glue it together. The complexity is increasing, but we are used to that. Give me a VAX any day and I’d be tempted to go back to the salad days. But we weren’t in the board room were we? 😉

The new CIO is the one who can orchestrate, govern, and embed AI-driven solutions across the whole organisation. And get credit for it. Possibly, for those with grit, gone are the days of “Business success; IT failure.”

Perhaps this might drive a consolidation of CxO roles (that proliferated these last 10 years) and further enable a rationalisation of the top leadership team with the CIO, CFO and CEO in the new triumverate. It's already the case in many organisations. Whether that role is called "Information" or another name for the rose (e.g., "Marketing", "Digitalisation", "Transformation", or "Technology"). As the famous Bard said, "a rose by any other name is still a rose." It's the CIO role in new guise.

GenAI shifts the pressure onto individuals, not the role itself. Some CIOs who thrived in a world of the simple and the complex (see #cynefin framework) and well-defined IT processes and SLA-driven services may struggle in an era where agility, AI fluency, and business-first thinking are mandatory.

So to the question… some individuals may be diminished. But as is always the case, for those willing to evolve, deepening their AI leadership capability and rethinking what IT actually is, will find their plaque is still shiny at the senior table.

Simple answer: I think GenAI makes the CIO role more essential than ever. But it is a fast paced world where we must adapt or …. be automated. 😉 I don’t want to wait around to find out if that is a euphemism.