CIO Role Rewritten in Real Time: From Systems Delivery to Business Outcomes

TIAA contact center associates once needed 81 inches of screens — 11 systems — to answer a single retirement question. "As tall as LeBron James," says Sastry Durvasula, COO of the retirement and investment services provider after years running its technology organization. The old CIO instinct, he says, was to build a better interface and debate build versus buy. The question that matters now is why one question requires 11 systems at all.

That shift defines the modern CIO. AI makes rapid, ground-up workflow redesign possible, so leaders who built reputations on delivering systems reliably now decide whether work should exist, and who or what should do it. The remit is broadening well beyond the technology organization into how the business builds, operates, and grows.

What are companies hiring CIOs to do now?

Organizations want CIOs who answer questions unrelated to technology purchases, says Scott Gracyalny, managing director at Protiviti. The first questions are usually: which processes should be redesigned or eliminated before technology is applied, and how should accountability change when people and digital workers operate together?

CIOs make their mark by asking whether a process, approval, or handoff still serves a purpose, notes Mukesh Ranjan, vice president at Everest Group. Yogesh Joshi, SVP of global AI platforms at TransUnion, notes many processes were designed around human limitations; AI lets leaders "redesign workflows from first principles." Durvasula adds that CIOs can now assign work to a human, an agent, or a designed combination — but the human-agent handoff discipline is one "most organizations haven't developed yet."

The remit also covers enabling non-engineers to build. "Now I have to think about how we enable someone who understands a business problem to build the solution themselves, while my team provides the right boundaries," says Paul Hirschorn, CIO of expense platform PEX. A PEX project manager with no engineering background used AI to build a third-party risk management platform after vendor tools fell short; his team wrapped it in source control, approval gates, and a locked-down cloud environment.

Jessica Kral, CIO of Modivcare through 2025 and now an executive coach, added product responsibility and investment decisions, and was judged on her "ability to set business strategy and direction."

Why is the CIO now the reality check on AI?

CIOs must distinguish "an AI initiative that's genuinely valuable and one that's simply well-demoed," says Durvasula. Kral says many CEOs and boards treat AI like a magic lamp; conversations have shifted from cost to managing expectations against the data and systems foundation actually in place.

Cross-functional alignment is now CIO work. Durvasula spends disproportionate time aligning finance on the investment case, legal on new data access patterns, and operations on "one target state instead of eleven parallel ones." That is "an organizational design problem," he says, not a technology one.

Legacy systems block returns too. Everest Group's April 2026 survey found 67% of IT leaders cite legacy infrastructure and 55% cite change management as barriers to AI value. "So far, we're seeing much more evidence of productivity improvements than radical process redesign," says Eric Sigurdson, who leads the CIO practice at Russell Reynolds.

How has accountability changed?

Uptime, security, and delivery timelines are table stakes now, Durvasula says. "I don't accept an AI success story told to me in technology terms anymore." He wants downstream impact: a five-handoff workflow reduced to two, a weeks-long process cut to days.

Boards have changed too. Directors want the accountable human when an agent errs on a retirement account, the audit trail, and proof for regulators. "The conversation has shifted from 'what can AI do' to 'what is our accountability architecture when AI does something consequential,'" he says.

Who gets the job?

A 2025 Russell Reynolds report found 53% of Fortune 500 top technology officers were hired externally, and 42% of those came from a different industry. "What is becoming less important is having done the exact same job in the exact same industry," says Sigurdson. Burke Autrey, president of Fortium Partners, a ZRG company, still favors experience: "The single greatest predictor of success in the CIO seat is prior success in the CIO seat."

The title itself is shifting: 49% of Fortune 500 top technology leaders held the CIO title in 2024, down from 68% five years earlier. The chief AI officer role is "a new technology, not a new role," says Autrey. Expect hybrid titles and a move, in Gracyalny's words, "from IT leader to enterprise governor." Durvasula calls what comes next CIO+, and predicts the function will be "largely unrecognizable" in five years — owned by those who deliver business outcomes, not technical infrastructure in isolation.