CEO-CIO Alignment Is Now the Make-or-Break Factor for AI Decisions
New global research from Netskope (NASDAQ: NTSK) shows a clear message for executive teams: AI ambitions stall without tight CEO-CIO alignment. While CIOs are being asked to drive transformation, cost control, and workforce strategy, many don't feel fully backed to make long-term bets.
The report finds 39% of CIOs feel misaligned with their CEOs on key decisions. A third lack clarity on CEO expectations, and 34% don't feel empowered to set long-term IT strategy-even as AI expands their remit far beyond traditional IT.
Key findings leaders should act on
- Alignment gap: 39% of CIOs say they're misaligned with their CEO on decision-making; 31% aren't confident they know what their CEO expects.
- Strategy authority: 34% don't feel empowered to make long-term IT strategy decisions.
- Infrastructure urgency: 41% say the business must invest more in modernizing IT infrastructure.
- Buy-in friction: 26% find it hard to secure CEO support for modernization and transformation strategies.
- Expanded scope: 34% of CIOs are now significantly more involved in priorities beyond IT, including human capital planning, digital innovation, and operational resilience.
- Evolving skill mix: 37% say business strategy and stakeholder management now outweigh pure technical expertise for the CIO role.
What CEOs expect from CIOs
- Advance AI with discipline: prioritize business outcomes over hype and deploy responsibly.
- Prove ROI: show cost savings and productivity gains early and often.
- Build guardrails: ensure governance and ethics are embedded from day one.
- Strengthen the base: modernize the IT estate to support AI at scale.
- Lead workforce impact: oversee performance and governance of AI agents alongside human teams.
Six conversations to prioritize
- Cost: Where will AI reduce unit costs in the next 12 months? Agree on target savings and reinvestment rules.
- Risk: Define risk appetite, data boundaries, and escalation paths for AI incidents and model drift.
- Innovation: Maintain a use-case portfolio with stage gates, value hypotheses, and sunset criteria.
- People: Clarify org design, AI agent oversight, reskilling plans, and ethical standards for productivity targets.
- Measurement: Set a small set of metrics: time-to-value, cost per task/output, quality thresholds, and risk thresholds.
- IT estate: Identify critical upgrades for data pipelines, identity, security, and network performance to support AI workloads.
90-day alignment plan
- Host a CEO-CIO working session to agree on top three AI outcomes and non-negotiable guardrails.
- Map current AI use cases to revenue, cost, and risk outcomes; drop low-value experiments.
- Define an AI governance model with owners for data, security, compliance, and model lifecycle.
- Approve a minimal viable modernization plan for data access, security controls, and network capacity.
- Create an executive dashboard: value delivered, risks, infra readiness, and workforce impact.
- Stand up a cross-functional "AI value office" to coordinate use cases, funding, and change management.
- Set policy for AI agents: performance standards, audit logs, human oversight, and escalation.
- Launch targeted reskilling for managers and analysts to work effectively with AI-generated outputs.
- Lock quarterly business reviews focused on outcomes, not activity.
- Agree decision rights: what the CIO owns outright vs. what requires CEO/board approval.
Implications for boards
- Ask for a clear AI thesis tied to strategy, plus a short list of funded use cases with expected payback.
- Scrutinize infrastructure debt and its impact on AI speed, reliability, and security.
- Oversee AI risk controls and workforce readiness, including the use of AI agents.
About the research
The report, "Crucial Conversations: How to Achieve CIO-CEO Alignment in the Era of AI," is based on interviews with global CEOs, quantitative research with over 200 CIOs in the US and UK, and expert input from CIOs, CEOs, COOs, and business strategy leaders. It highlights the six discussions above as the fastest path to better AI decisions and measurable outcomes.
Learn more about the research and company at Netskope.
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About Netskope
Netskope, a leader in modern security and networking for the cloud and AI era, provides optimized access and real-time, context-based security for people, devices, and data anywhere. Thousands of customers, including more than 30 of the Fortune 100, trust the Netskope One platform, its Zero Trust Engine, and the NewEdge network to reduce risk and gain visibility and control across cloud, AI, SaaS, web, and private applications-improving security and performance without trade-offs.
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