The Critical Priorities For CIOs In 2025

Uploaded on 2024-12-17 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW

What are the critical priorities for security & technology business leasders for 2025?

With AI innovation at a tipping point, CIOs must lead this transformation through democratised delivery - securing active business co-leadership and deploying adaptive AI studios to empower teams with scalable AI tools.

Shifting from AI exploration to delivering measurable outcomes, such as improved revenue, operating margins, and customer experience.

1. What should be a CIO's top priority in 2025?
The transition from AI exploration to driving measurable AI-enabled business outcomes. Pursue use cases with a direct improvement on operating margin, revenue generation, or customer experience. For public sector CIOs, prioritize direct mission achievement and citizen experience.

2. What makes this priority so essential?
This is a once-in-a-generation moment where decades of AI algorithmic, model, and technique progress can finally scale in real-world use cases with the convergence of high-speed connectivity, parallel processing compute, proliferation of data, and modernized applications. As CIOs, if we don’t help our institutions embrace this moment, they will be left behind. This is our time to make a game-changing difference!

3. What's the best way to accomplish this priority?
Democratized delivery. This is not merely a technology implementation. It’s a paradigm change. Two dimensions to democratized delivery:

1. Secure co-leadership with business heads where AI will transform their operation. More than business sponsorship, co-leadership is active, hands-on and engaged in frequent reviews. It requires confronting and resolving complex challenges, like change management and data governance, and deploying dedicated business talent.

2. Deploy and continuously evolve a robust agentic AI studio from which the business talent can build and deploy agents. Equip them for the triple-A evolution:

Agents that assist with Gen AI content and ML insights.
Agents that act with human-in-the-loop transactional capabilities.
Agents with autonomy that use reasoning engines and guard rails to assume digital personas.

4. What resources will be needed to accomplish this priority
The usual constructs of software, data, and systems are there. But with AI’s breakneck pace of innovation, the number one resource is a cross-functional adaptive workforce embracing a growth mindset and a culture of collaboration.

Technologists who increase their business acumen and business analysts who strengthen their digital dexterity. All working together in a fusion team aligned to the north star of breakthrough progress on targeted business outcome KPI.

Dan Krantz is CIO at Keysight Technologies

Image: Spacepixel Creative

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