To drive strategic and sustainable AI innovation, IT leaders should play a 3-part orchestrater role: Educate stakeholders, facilitate change management, and align with the business.
The growing wave of business-led AI adoption puts a fresh spin on the CIO function. While IT leaders maintain traditional technology oversight, they’re increasingly morphing into the role of chief orchestrator. This involves leading efforts to strategically align AI initiatives to key business goals and spearheading organizational change management.
As the connective tissue across business units, functional domains, customers and partners, CIOs are well positioned to facilitate a cohesive AI strategy drawn from decentralized activity in areas such as AI agents, model development and training, as well as implementation of leading practices. At the same time, CIOs continue to play an essential role in AI infrastructure and architecture, governance issues, and what’s required to train and upskill the workforce.
“Forward-thinking CIOs who can effectively go from back-office technology management to working across the business and with vendors and customers to build next-generation, transformative systems and processes will thrive,” says Cenk Ozdemir, CIO Advisory Lead and Global Tech Growth Leader for PwC Advisory. “They can completely change their role in the organization going forward.”
The orchestrator’s action plan
CIOs ready to embrace the “orchestrator” mantle should consider these key recommendations:
Shape, but don’t own, sole responsibility for AI innovation strategy and vision. CIOs are essential to helping define AI strategy, but this should be an entire C-suite and business leader operation. Companies that delegate AI strategy to technical leadership or decentralized business teams often end up with a series of point solutions that don’t work in concert to advance transformation and enterprise business goals.
As a credible business partner, CIOs can help mold and steer innovation that hails from the business. “It’s not just understanding business problems and speaking the language of business — it’s about forging alliances and teams to take an end-to-end view of business challenges,” says Dan Priest, PwC’s chief AI officer.
Think of AI as a force multiplier, not just an enabling technology. AI is not simply a tool for automation and headcount reduction. In their role as orchestrator, CIOs should be working to help business domains fully understand the power of AI to reimagine functions, create new commercial opportunities and, ultimately, deliver value for customers. “CIOs should have a dual mirror, looking internally at leveraging AI to reduce costs and boost efficiencies while taking a product-based mindset and teaming up with the business to create commercial value,” says Ozdemir.
Be a change agent. It’s the CIO’s job to make sure everyone in the company — from board members to the C-suite to employees and investors — understand what AI technologies bring to the table, what the risks are and how responsible approaches can help mitigate them. . While pervasive AI calls for a top-down leadership mandate to drive the requisite organizational and culture change, CIOs who can forge a robust relationship with the business are more likely to achieve stakeholder buy-in, build trust in AI, and get employees comfortable with changing work patterns. “The business change is the hard part, so the business should be involved,” Priest says.
Start addressing challenges with scale. Companies struggle to scale AI initiatives because most implementations are grounded in strategies that don’t account for scale. Too often, AI development is centered on individuals solving their own productivity or creativity problems — not imagining how generative AI and AI agents can be harnessed at a higher level to solve collective, cross-functional challenges.
At the same time, proof of concepts (POCs) don’t frequently advance beyond experimentation, becoming a place for good AI ideas to die. “We’re trying to go from the POC circle of death to looking at what problems we can solve — not in a microcosm, but at a 50,000-foot view,” says a CIO at a major publishing company.
Think outside the box. AI is driving major change at an accelerated clip. The inflection point requires a soup-to-nuts rethinking – from your technology stack to the way your organization is structured and wired for innovation. These changes require being open to doing things differently and gaining a comfort level with not having definitive answers— just yet.
“The biggest challenge may be thinking differently about problems that have plagued us for so long,” Priest says. “But the solutions of the past will not likely be our solutions going forward.”
To learn more, visit AI agents for IT: PwC
