cio_es16d ago
The CIO role keeps expanding like wildfire, with leaders taking on more responsibilities both within and beyond the IT organization as AI reshapes the nature of business. Now, spearheading an agentic AI future, the CIO role has added a new moniker: chief intelligence orchestrator. Instead of just managing IT infrastructure, chief intelligence orchestrators architect integrated platforms and governance models that allow the business to better utilize existing data and bridge what are often siloed functions. This enables them to orchestrate end-to-end business processes, ensuring employees, copilots, and intelligent agents work cohesively. AI governance, integration, and cross-functional leadership are also reshaping the role.According to recent research from Forbes, 82% of CIOs view themselves as unifiers who are “reaching across silos to advocate for innovation across departments. That could be one reason why executives list the CIO — more than any other C-suite role — as the leader they’d most like to collaborate with in the year ahead.”In addition to breaching silos, CIOs may now find themselves managing agentic HR and workforces, owning strategy and P&L outcomes instead of just enabling them, and managing portfolios beyond IT, Gartner observed in an August 2025 report on how the CIO role may evolve within five years.Orchestrating hybrid workforcesWith autonomous agents becoming more integrated into workflows and able to access sensitive data and take action, CIOs must now orchestrate how these agents work with employees and copilots.Saket Srivastava, CIO of work management platform provider Asana, believes this is the year the CIO role “shifts from primarily managing systems to orchestrating how work moves across the business. CIOs will be judged on how effectively they improve cycle time, predictability, and throughput in the workflows that drive revenue, customer experience, and day-to-day operations,” Srivastava says.This shift will include using AI that is built into core business processes instead of isolated personal assistants, and sharing embedded agents that work within a company’s processes and have the right context, permissions, and guardrails, he says.It also means interacting with more leaders across the organization. “CIOs will work closely with HR and finance to redesign roles, skills, and incentives around this new model AI-assisted teamwork,” Srivastava says. “The CIO’s value will come not from owning technology, but from structuring and governing the system where humans and AI operate together.”Connecting the dotsSome CIOs believe they have long been seen as orchestrators. “I began on the business operations side but moved into IT after seeing its potential to unlock growth,” says Annlea Rumfola, executive vice president and CIO of vital organ therapy company Vantive. “Coming from environments shaped heavily by M&A further taught me the importance of orchestrating change — integrating systems, cultures, and priorities for sustainable growth.” The role is about connecting the dots between business needs and strategic enablement, and aligning IT not just as a support function, but as a true partner in driving growth and transformation, Runfola says. “It is my responsibility to harmonize our IT systems, optimize workflows, and ensure ethical, scalable outcomes,” which requires agility, she says. “As you can imagine, this is an orchestration within our team and across the enterprise. It requires a great team and experienced IT leaders, partnership with the C-suite [with] understanding and support from the enterprise.”Like Rumfola, Sean Perry, CIO of global workforce services provider Kelly, says that the CIO role has long been about “orchestrating the enterprise.” What is new is how the CIO now oversees a lot of the new components coming in.Previously, the CIO was “the deliverer of all of those components,” akin to the conductor of an orchestra, Perry says. Business units have their preferences for the things they want to use, “and connecting the dots and making sure that all the pieces work together is really your challenge.”SaaS has given business units more independence to figure out how to implement their own systems, Perry says. “But at the end of the day, the tools only work as they’re connected to the rest of the enterprise.” IT has seen several instances where good tools have come in delivered value on their own, he says. But when they are connected with the rest of the enterprise, they can deliver exponential value — and that’s where the CIO, as an intelligence orchestrator, adds real value.For Julia Sears, the CIO role used to be about building a store, putting up the shelves, and letting the business decide what to stock. “Today, the expectation is that we not only build it, but make sure it’s stocked thoughtfully and everything on the shelves is of the highest quality,” says Sears, chief digital/technology officer of Altus Power. “The scope has changed.”Echoing Perry, Sears says, “Now it’s about full adoption across the company, managing efficiency, and measuring success. It’s a whole new level.”Challenges of being an intelligence orchestratorSears’ core responsibilities haven’t changed and she is still focused on data management, digital transformation, and automation. But what has changed is the pace, she says. This makes it more difficult to be someone who orchestrates several different moving parts in tandem.“There’s this sense of urgency now, not just to build things better, faster, and stronger, but to deliver real, tangible value for every single person in the organization,” Sears says. Couple this with how fast AI is moving, “and that means you have to adapt quickly, deploy solutions thoughtfully and ensure teams across the organization actually understand and use them,” she says. “Technology only creates value if it’s adopted.”The scope of responsibilities and expectations have also expanded significantly, Sears adds. “Today the impact of technology is measured much more directly. Employee productivity, job satisfaction, even [employee net promoter scores] are all directly tied to the solutions my team creates.”One challenge Sears faced was when IT recently built and launched an internal product called Binder — a comprehensive document intelligence pipeline that digests and classifies over 3 million pieces of unstructured documentation. The idea was to make important documents, including contracts and solar plans, more accessible for various stakeholders across the organization. Binder runs through each of those 3 million documents and removes duplicates and redlined drafts, ensuring that users have access to the latest versions, then it classifies the documents by type and reorganizes them.The challenging part, she says, was getting everyone aligned and spotting gaps in how the data was organized. “It was a true ‘human-in-the-loop’ setup — AI did the initial classification, then a user verified it, and finally, an expert certified it,” Sears says. “There were lots of moving pieces to keep in sync.”The beta rollout caused some confusion, she admits. “It took a ton of people, a lot of trust, and honestly, there was a lot of AI skepticism. But we pushed it through — and since then, we’ve updated the system’s capabilities and all the documentation so things run smoother.”Encouraging experimentation and building coalitionsThe role of orchestrator is also a challenge for Rumfola as she juggles everything involved with helping Vantive become a seamless, standalone company that recently separated from a parent organization. “The most common challenge we have is if new priorities emerge when other major initiatives are under way,” she notes. “In these situations, we bring stakeholders together to align on needs and priorities, ensuring informed decision-making occurs in collaboration. Effective change management andcross-functional alignment are essential to address these complexities and keep our efforts moving forward.”For Kelly’s Perry, being an orchestrator means “creating a little chaos and encouraging experimentation. It’s about coaxing users to ‘Try this out on the tools we’ve provided’ ... That’s one of fun parts of the role.” At least once a month, Perry says he’s been surprised by what someone in the organization is using AI to do.Yet, it is also sometimes a challenge in simply communicating what IT is doing to the rest of the organization, Perry adds. It requires “a lot of coalition building; it’s a lot of conversations, it’s a lot of discussions getting people thinking about [innovation], and sometimes it may feel like you’re sort of shouting into the void.”Every week, Perry writes a newsletter that goes out to leadership and the whole organization about everything IT has done in the past week. Sometimes, as he’s writing, he wonders whether anyone is reading the newsletters. “And then, every once in a while, some people are like, ‘Oh, I saw that thing,’ or I got a thumbs up.” This is heartening because “we’re trying to diffuse this technology into the organization ... and encourage experimentation,” he says. “So I would say sometimes you wonder if all the pushing you’re doing is resulting in forward motion, but every once in a while you get a reminder that it is.”A natural progressionTransitioning to a chief intelligence orchestrator make sense, given the advancement of relationships CIOs have made with other leaders that have established trust throughout the organization, says Tanya Townsend, chief information and digital officer at Stanford Children’s Health.“We are not only responsible for day-to-day support of technology, but we are now the enabler of new innovations, and to execute on those strategies successfully, we must be partners with the clinical and operational sides of the business,” she says.CIOs have proven capabilities to bring together people, processes, and technologies across an organization given that this is the nature of what they do — automating business operations and strategies throughout an organization, Townsend says.So it seems logical that with AI momentum building, while CIOs continue to manage their traditional responsibilities, they have more functions reporting to them now, beyond the CTO, CISO, and CDO/CDIO. This is drawing further attention from the rest of the C-suite and boards, she says.“Now we add AI, analytics, decision support, informatics, and organizational governance,” Townsend says. “These additional responsibilities give [CIOs] greater visibility to the C-suite and boards. It’s been my experience that boards are increasingly interested in AI risk and governance, responsible data usage, and predictive capabilities for competitive advantage.”Rumfola believes that good CIOs have always approached the job with an orchestration mindset. “The title may be new, but the responsibilities — connecting business needs with strategic technology enablement — have been at the heart of the role forever,” she says. “For me, it is a natural evolution reflecting the increasing importance of intelligence, agility, and partnership in today’s digital economy.” Sears says the chief intelligence orchestrator title “feels right for where we are today. But in a landscape moving this fast, the title will keep evolving — the responsibility won’t.”For Townsend, an evolving CIO title might be a good thing as she fears “the change to ‘orchestrator’ could trigger organizational friction. While many of my chief information officer colleagues and I have advocated to be viewed as strategic partners, this verbiage change could set us back a decade as our [business] colleagues may find it to be an overreach or arrogant,” she says. “My recommendation is to educate [people] on the evolution of the current title, which is naturally happening — without making an official change.”
