From AI foundations to improved customer experiences, CIOs are pushing vital 2025 projects across the finish line — and setting up their companies for further success in the year ahead.
There may be just over two months left in 2025, but that’s enough time to deliver a few more IT wins and set the stage for bigger victories in the year to come.
Given the long list of priorities CIOs had at the start of this year, IT leaders still have plenty of opportunities to pursue — from AI initiatives to strategy adjustments.
What work are IT leaders looking to push across the finish line before the year runs out? Here’s a look at the end-of-year projects making CIOs’ must-do-now lists.
1. Shoring up the AI governance policy
The race to harness artificial intelligence in the enterprise has been under way for years, yet many organizations don’t yet have a fully formed AI governance policy.
The 2025 Public Company Board Practices and Oversight Survey from the National Association of Corporate Directors found that only 36% of boards have adopted an AI governance framework, only 23% have reevaluated corporate strategies to incorporate AI’s impact, and a mere 27% have incorporated AI oversight responsibilities into board committee charters.
“AI governance is all over the place,” says Eric Bloom, executive director of the IT Management and Leadership Institute. “For CIOs [whose organizations] don’t have AI governance and usage guidelines, they should create them now. And if they developed them more than a year ago, then they should be readdressing them because the technology has changed so much and so quickly.”
RGP CIO Keith Golden is tackling this task, knowing that having up-to-date guidelines is key for successful AI deployments. The global consulting and project execution company has an AI task force working to develop “a fully-fledged governance model” that will include ways to evaluate and prioritize proposed AI projects, he says, adding that this work will include establishing processes to monitor and measure AI initiatives to ensure they deliver business value.
“We’re taking steps to really manage our own AI shop effectively,” Golden says, noting that he’s aiming to finish work on this by year’s end.
2. Strengthening the foundation needed for AI deployments
Successful AI deployments require more than good governance; they also need the right data and technology environment.
Many CIOs are making sure those elements are in place ASAP, says Eric Stettler, partner in the technology transformation practice at Kearney, a global strategy and management consulting firm.
“The CIO needs to make sure the foundational capabilities — data, application architecture, the enterprise architecture, the needed skill sets — are all set up to take full advantage of AI technologies and deliver meaningful outcomes for the organization,” Stettler says, noting that the lack of these contributes to the high percentage of organizations struggling to move AI pilots to enterprise-scale production.
Brian Fruh, former CIO and head of technology at Impax Asset Management and now offering fractional CIO services, says he and other CIOs are making big plays to that end, particularly around data.
“There is still more work to be done with data governance and making sure [organizations] have a single source of truth. There is a sense of urgency now as AI is maturing, because you can’t fully capitalize on AI until data governance, the single source of truth, data security, and those other foundational pieces are in place,” Fruh says.
3. Delivering AI that has demonstrable value
A September 2025 report from Boston Consulting Group titled The Widening AI Value Gap included sobering findings: “Only 5% of companies in our 2025 study of more than 1,250 firms worldwide are achieving AI value at scale — a measure of how tough the full AI transformation is. Fully 60% of companies are not achieving material value at all, reporting minimal revenue and cost gains despite substantial investment.”
Given such figures, CIOs are feeling the pressure to deliver, says Ian Pitt, executive vice president and CIO at Progress Software.
“It feels as if we’re almost in the second trough of disillusionment with AI, the first being after ChatGPT came out when we found it didn’t solve all our problems. Now, with this new round of AI, CEOs and CFOs are now saying, ‘Show me the value,’” he says. “If CIOs aren’t working on that, they should, because the life of the IT leader is all about returns on investment. We can talk about keeping the bad guys out, keeping the lights on, enabling a great workplace, but it all has to come with a was-it-all-worth-it mindset.”
Pitt and his IT team are working to deploy more AI within the company that will measurably boost productivity or generate efficiencies, he says.
A big focus heading into the last quarter for Pitt is making sure “everyone in the company is a frequent return visitor” to the Microsoft Copilot capabilities that IT had deployed earlier this year. He is measuring the rate of the technology’s use by user and identifying those who need more training to ensure the company gets to full adoption fast. Working to get high adoption rates means the company can maximize the value of its investment, he says.
“It’s all around making sure we can end the year on a high point,” he adds.
Other CIOs, including Pegasystems CIO David Vidoni, are making a similar push to close out 2025.
Vidoni is looking to deploy agentic AI in ways that support the company’s goals of rapid growth without additional costs. He and his IT team are creating agents to help employees move through their work more quickly and easily. For example, one agent in progress will identify sales leads, pull relevant information on the customer and products, and draft custom proposals — enabling Pegasystems account executives to finalize the messaging without having to manually perform as much of that work.
4. Readying employees for AI-enabled attacks
Deepfake incidents are increasingly impacting organizations, according to research firm Gartner, pointing to a 2025 survey showing that 43% of responding tech leaders saw at least one audio call incident and 37% experienced deepfakes in video calls.
RGP’s Golden is now working to step up his organization’s readiness to fend off those and other AI-enabled attacks.
“The threat actors are using AI tools and AI automation, so it’s a good idea for CIOs to look at their own tooling and coverage to see where there are weaknesses and also talk to vendors about how they’re preparing,” he says.
Golden and others list several steps they’re taking now to help their organizations better defend against AI-enabled attacks, a list that includes educating leadership on the risks, implementing training programs that specifically address the threat, and implementing more AI in their security programs.
5. Improving customer and employee experiences
Both lines of business leaders and IT leaders listed improving customer experience as a top priority for 2025, according to the State of the CIO Survey published in May by CIO.com.
Gartner in its 2025 CIO Agenda survey similarly found that improving customer experience was a top goal for the year, coming in at No. 5 on the list of CIO priorities.
Pegasystems’ Vidoni wants to close out the year with a few more wins in this category.
“On the client experience side, we’re having a big push to make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for from us, make it more intuitive for customers to interact with us, make it easier to find what they need,” he says, stressing that customers now expect both great products and great experiences from companies.
Vidoni says improving customer experience supports company objectives beyond customer satisfaction and retention, explaining that improved customer experience reduces the workload on staff by reducing the need for customers to connect with employees for information.
He and his IT team are working to add AI agents to customer-facing features to help make company-customer interactions fast, seamless, productive, and personalized.
6. Speeding up
Jamil Farshchi, CTO at Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies in the US, says he wants IT to focus on bringing more speed to the business — something he has been working on but isn’t yet finished with.
“Our most significant IT win this year isn’t a single product or a platform. It’s making every part of our business run faster,” he says. “Our multiyear, approximately $3 billion Equifax cloud transformation has equipped us to increase our speed in a variety of ways, including processing data, onboarding customers, shipping new products, and detecting threats.”
That transformation has brought the company plenty of wins already, “and we’re on track to launch around 150 new products before the end of the year,” Farshchi says, noting “we’ve made great strides, but there’s no finish line.”
7. Preparing a realistic 2026 budget (that can handle uncertainty)
The outlook for 2026 is mixed, with executives downgrading expectations and bracing for possible economic turbulence.
That’s the message CIOs are getting. Gartner’s 2026 CIO Agenda Preview report declared, “Executives have hit the brakes on 2025 growth forecasts,” explaining that “74% of executive leadership teams have lowered 2025 top-line growth expectations for their organizations. Organizations are, on average, recalibrating top-line growth expectations downward by 8.3% relative to expectations at the start of the year.”
The Gartner report also found that only 53% of CIOs expect their budgets to increase in 2026, with the average increase being only 2.79%. Some 27% expect a level-funded budget and 19% anticipate a decrease in IT spending year of year. CIOs can expect “to face sustained pressure to reduce costs and improve productivity,” Gartner wrote in its report.
RGP’s Golden is developing an IT budget for 2026 that will deliver what the business needs while respecting the current macroeconomic uncertainty, listing the ability to successfully balance those issues as one win he wants to notch before the year closes.
“For most people this is budget season coming up, and for most of the colleagues I talk to and what I hear back from clients is that we’re still in a time of economic uncertainty. So our budget is all-weather. We need to be prepared if there is a lift, and we need to be prepared for choppy waters. Many of my colleagues have that same kind of framing,” Golden says.
To thread the needle here, Golden says he’s building a budget based on “what we absolutely have to have regardless of economic conditions and what we might do if the macroeconomic lift is coming. We’ll have what we’re prepared to do under any circumstance.”
