The IT department at Unum Group had a product management structure and worked in an agile delivery model.

This operating model gave IT teams and the company wins by rapidly delivering what they call “investment capabilities” that were aligned to the business.

But Shelia Anderson, who became executive vice president and chief information and digital officer in May 2025, saw room for improvement. She wanted to fine-tune her department’s operating structure to ensure investments deliver returns.

“There wasn’t a great correlation between those investments and that value recognition. So the part of it that needed some work was achieving value recognition in the business and making sure there was accountability for that,” Anderson says.

She also wanted accountability for improving time-to-value for investments, whether that value stemmed from productivity gains, improving customer experiences, or some other objective.

To do that, Anderson adopted a value stream model to analyze and optimize the end-to-end experience across each value chain within Unum Group, a provider of workplace benefits and services, including disability insurance, life insurance, and supplemental health products.

With that model shift, the company’s product-based approach became a business-owned one. Each value stream is now owned by a business leader, with the product management team associated with that value stream now reporting to that owner.

The core IT team assigned to each value stream includes a customer experience professional, a data lead, and an architecture lead. The team uses agile practices to deliver products along with product improvements, as products are part of the value stream.

“In insurance we have a lot of processes; products are within the larger processes,” Anderson explains, “and you have multiple processes that sit within a journey, so most of our products are within a value stream.”

Furthermore, the value stream model facilitates IT and business function collaboration to “make decisions around what we’re solving for and what are we going to deliver in this round of iteration,” she says. It also enables Unum Group to deliver end-to-end process improvements and change management as part of the deliverables, and measure the value delivered, she adds.

“The value stream concept is truly wrapping those all together,” Anderson says.

Rethinking the IT operating model

Anderson’s overhaul of the IT strategy at Unum Group showcases how CIOs are rethinking the IT operating model.

Many IT leaders are moving from traditional silos — security, development, support, etc. — to groupings designed around products, value streams, journeys, and customer lifecycles.

And they are doing so for several reasons, says Amar Aswatha, senior vice president for global business engineering at consulting and services firm CGI. To start, they have found that IT isn’t getting the business what it needs when it needs it. They have also found that IT’s work costs too much — “efficiency is slow as is productivity,” Aswatha says. And they are coming to realize that IT as traditionally configured can’t keep up with the pace of technology change and innovation.

As a result, CIOs are finding that a traditional structure focused on outputs (the delivery of a project, for example) instead of outcomes (for example, a specific, measurable improvement in business productivity) won’t get the business where it wants to go.

“So today CIOs are thinking about how to build a level of adaptability and agility in their operations model, and they’re thinking about how to build an organization that is continuously learning what’s working, where are the bottlenecks and points of frictions, and how they can get earlier signals on what’s not working so they can make adaptive changes,” says Fiona Mark, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Ken Spangler, an instructor at Carnegie Mellon University’s CIDO Program, sees a trend toward organizing IT operations in a hybrid centralized-federated structure organized around products, domains, or capabilities. Here, there are centralized platforms, but enablement of those platforms is federated. For example, IT creates and maintains AI as a platform (the centralized component) but has IT working in business-facing teams to enable the various uses of the AI platform to deliver business value (the federated part).

The centralized IT work includes engineering and security teams, Spangler says. Product teams, which include product owners and business roles, support the federated work. CIOs ensure there’s a governance structure to manage both sides.

“In the AI era, it’s about product, platform, and governance: product for speed, platform for scale, and governance for control and risk management,” adds Spangler, who formerly served as executive vice president and CIO of FedEx Global Operations Technology.

Making the shift

For Anderson, Unum’s shift to a value stream model has required “a reimagining for roles” within the IT department as well as the expectations for those roles, she says. It also has IT teams thinking about the next evolution of agile and how they’ll use it to improve the work they’re aiming to do.

Sharing possibilities give Anderson the opportunity to leverage that centralized-federated approach within this value stream model as well. “There are some components of a value stream that could be shared,” she notes, pointing to the company’s data layer and integration layers that also exist to enable and support the products that are part of the value stream.

At Unum, teams are no longer static, with some IT workers assigned to multiple value steam core teams, Anderson says. To support IT professionals working in this new value stream model, Anderson will likely also adopt a chapter model, where IT employees are organized by discipline. That way chapter members who work on different value stream teams can come together to develop skills, foster expertise, define standards, and advance their careers.

So far, Unum’s shift to a value stream model has been incremental, with the first iteration having been completed in the first quarter of 2026. Still, Anderson is confident that the move will yield benefits.

For example, having a single value stream owner creates a higher level of accountability for ensuring investments deliver value.

“They know the north star of the value stream,” she says, adding that this empowers value stream owners to make quicker, better decisions around starting, continuing, or stopping investments. The model works well with a persistent funding approach as well as using metrics and score cards for measuring benefits and ROI. All that in turn helps teams “have a clear understanding of the value stream and what’s expected.”

“It’s truly shifting culture, so there is a clear structure around what result do we want, what is the process change, what’s the change needed with people, and then what’s the technology that’s needed. It’s getting the right people in the room to make those decisions,” Anderson says. “It’s truly business and technology at the table doing that design.”

Getting to the big picture

After starting as CIO of Tungsten Automation in February 2025, Shelley Seewald restructured her IT department into three components: business operations, enterprise IT delivery, and IT operations. The IT department had had a traditional operating model structured around technology, with a Salesforce team, a financial systems team, and the like.

Seewald felt a shakeup in how IT operates would move the organization away from being order-takers, which she says leads to an “inefficient and ineffective use of technology.” Her new structure breaks down silos and allows IT to “see the bigger picture, to see the ecosystem, to connect dots, and to spot opportunities,” she says.

Now each IT delivery team is aligned to a commercial organization (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) or a back-office function (finance, legal, HR, etc.).

“The teams meet with them weekly, prioritize work, learn the business,” Seewald says. “This allows us [the IT department] to be a really a good technology partner. We’re there to understand the business first and then we offer them AI or technology solutions to help them reach their goals.”

IT operations is its own group comprising networking, help desk, and the like, Seewald adds. But even IT operations is expected to know the business side of the house. “They don’t align with a business per se, but we have them meet with IT delivery teams so they know what’s happening with the business as well and so they know about product introductions, new offices, and such.”

Challenges to tackle

Many CIOs have yet to move their IT operations from a conventional structure to one focused on products or value streams, says Rob Holbrook, principal of technology strategy and architecture with professional services firm Slalom.

The Global Tech Agenda 2026 from consultancy McKinsey & Co. reports that only about “one in ten top-performing companies have fully adopted product and platform models across all teams, which is more than four times that of other organizations. And nearly half of these companies indicate that at least half of their teams now operate this way.”

Such figures are not surprising, given the challenges that come with shifting how an organization operates.

For a shift to work, Holbrook says some CIOs and their teams must cultivate a true product mindset where IT leaders and workers have a clear understanding of the product IT delivery model.

CIOs also need to put in place a strong governance program to guide product teams, the business units, and the IT department in how to successfully work under such a model, Holbrook says. “They have to learn how to navigate it, and how to get needs prioritized,” he adds.

And CIOs should ensure that the focus on products and business outcomes doesn’t allow back-office needs to slip through the cracks, lest they end up with shadow IT filling those gaps, Holbrook says.

Powering growth

Julie Averill says moving to a modern IT operating model can produce significant value for an organization.

Averill modernized the IT operating model at Lululemon while working as executive vice president and global CIO from 2017 to 2025. She transitioned the department to product model mode, a shift that moved IT workers away from delivering initiatives to teams that owned products and the outcomes they were meant to generate.

“The business, management, and the product teams were all aligned along a mission and an outcome,” Averill explains. “The goal was to keep these teams together to work on outcomes but also have enough elasticity for team members to move to other products as business objectives changed.”

In this structure, Averill had centralized platform teams supporting shared infrastructure and capabilities, such as infrastructure, networking, and security. These teams, she notes, “became internal service teams.”

Averill, nowCEO of Gold Thread LLC and author of the book Chief Impact Officer, says changing the way IT operates “was an exercise in leadership.” It required convincing executive colleagues and business teams that the collaboration contributions they’d have to make and the new ways they’d have to fund product work would produce better results for the company. And it required hiring “technology-minded businesspeople and business-minded technologists who can understand and speak to the business but also can talk tech.”

Averill also says she needed to create professional communities, such as an engineering community, to support skills, standards, and a positive career experience for IT workers.

But the work was worth it, she says, crediting the changes she made while CIO with helping Lululemon grow from $2 billion to more than $10 billion in annual revenue over eight years.

Many organizations still lack a clear AI strategy, making it difficult for CIOs to drive real results when they deploy the technology.

Asked about their top challenges to AI initiatives, 31% of CIO respondents to CIO.com’s 2026 State of the CIO survey identified a lack of clarity on corporate AI strategy as a top challenge, while 24% said they’re uncertain about which department is responsible for meeting AI goals or ROI expectations. Another 20% said it’s difficult for them to engage with line-of-business leaders on AI goals.

Other top AI challenges include lack of in-house AI expertise (40%), lack of clear ROI metrics (32%), and too many competing demands for AI initiatives (28%).

The survey results come as no surprise to other IT leaders. Many organizations still seem to struggle with how to create an AI plan that makes sense, says Rishi Kaushal, CIO at cybersecurity vendor Entrust.

“They’re still in the early stages of defining a cohesive AI strategy,” he says. “This is where teams that are enabling AI are not talking to the teams that actually require some of the capabilities to be able to be more productive or grow at a different pace.”

Kaushal sees a lack of cooperation across the organization as a major stumbling block. Leaders from HR, risk, compliance, and legal, along with the top executive team, all need to be on the same page with the organization’s AI strategy, he says.

CIOs and other IT leaders must enable that cross-department buy-in, he recommends. The chief HR officer, for example, needs to endorse the AI plan and provide training, while the legal and IT teams need to understand the associated risks and how to mitigate them.

“Partner with all the leaders across the organization,” he advises. “This strategy falls apart if you cannot enable the AI capabilities, and the only way you can enable AI capabilities at scale is if you leverage the talent you have across the organization.”

Technology moves fast

Another challenge is the ever-advancing state of AI itself, Kaushal says. It’s difficult to write an AI strategy when the capabilities seem to change from week to week.

“Every month there’s something new, something different,” he says. “It takes you time to figure out if that’s good enough to get going, so the strategy is not a one-and-done deal. This is something that has to evolve as AI shifts.”

At the same time, organizations need to define who is responsible for meeting ROI and other goals, he adds.

“The way AI is changing so fast, it doesn’t sit neatly just with one function,” Kaushal says. “It cuts across different technology operations, so ownership is key. We’ve got to have clear, defined ownership, which is how we ensure that there’s accountability and metrics so that people have success and can keep evolving.”

Clear ownership of AI initiatives is essential, adds Shubhradeep Guha, chief delivery officer at AI platform provider Publicis Sapient. 

The business strategy should come from the CEO and executive team, while the CIO often plays a central role in translating that ambition into an execution model, he says. But strategy cannot sit with the IT team alone, he adds.

“AI strategy dies quickly when it is treated as a tech project instead of a business priority,” Guha says.

AI activity isn’t strategy

The survey’s results reflect what Guha sees in the marketplace.

“A lot of companies do not have an AI strategy as much as they have an AI activity list,” he notes. “Many organizations have enthusiasm for AI, but not enough clarity on where it is meant to create value, which decisions it should improve, and how success will be measured.”

A couple of AI pilots or a list of use cases don’t make up an AI strategy with clear goals on how to create value and measure success, Guha says.

“Without that clarity, AI programs can quickly become a collection of disconnected pilots rather than a focused strategy tied to business outcomes,” he adds. “Too many organizations are confusing experimentation with strategy.”

There’s broad confusion across organizations about who owns the AI strategy, adds Aman Mahapatra, CIO at AI and digital transformation consulting firm Tribeca Softech.

“The pattern is nearly universal,” he says. “Every C-suite executive believes AI is strategic, but nobody has agreed on who owns the strategy.”

In some cases, CIOs, COOs, CFOs, chief risk officers, and chief HR officers all claim ownership of the company’s AI strategy, he notes.

“That is not one company’s dysfunction,” Mahapatra says. “That is the default state at most large enterprises.”

While CIOs have a role, Mahapatra believes CEOs should own the corporate AI strategy. “The logic is simple: AI touches strategy, operations, risk, talent, and culture simultaneously,” he says. “No single functional leader has the authority to arbitrate across all of those.”

Mahapatra’s advice to CIOs is to do something counterintuitive — say no to most AI proposals.

“The CIOs getting this right fund fewer initiatives with more resources, clearer financial targets, and direct business ownership from day one,” he adds.

Successful CIOs will evaluate AI investments the same way the company looks at any other investment, by tying AI initiatives to the earnings plan before a line of code is written, he says.

“That sounds obvious but is shockingly rare,” Mahapatra adds. “Most organizations still budget AI as ‘innovation spend,’ which is corporate shorthand for, ‘We do not require this to pay for itself.’”

The most concerning number from the State of the CIO survey is that 24% of CIOs are uncertain about which department is responsible for meeting AI goals, he says. In many cases, ownership is split across organizations.

“‘Distributed’ is a polite word for ‘nobody,’” he says. “When ownership is spread without explicit accountability, every executive assumes someone else is tracking ROI.”

Mahapatra recommends that every AI initiative is connected to a business owner — not the CIO or CFO — who is accountable for the financial outcome.

“The CIO owns the technical platform and governance,” he adds. “The CFO validates returns against the balance sheet. The CEO arbitrates when priorities conflict.”

Joint ownership works, but only when each party’s specific accountability is written down, reviewed quarterly, and tied to compensation, he adds. “Otherwise, joint ownership becomes shared neglect.”

CIOs are challenged to communicate IT’s business value when the benefits of IT initiatives are realized in business-unit financials and workflow efficiencies. But a deeper question every CIO should ask is whether their IT department actually does have a value problem, where they might be getting things done but make little impact on business outcomes.

Here, honest evaluation is key. Research consistently shows a divide between how well IT is perceived to be functioning and how business executives recognize the value delivered. Examples of IT’s sagging reputation include low executive perception of IT services and underperforming digital investments.

IT operational improvements, security enhancements, and other risk-reduction programs are unfortunately recognized as core IT functions rather than strategic value drivers. Focusing IT’s value narrative on operational functions can put IT leadership positions at risk when the CFO seeks cost reductions from AI or other technology benefits.

IT must deliver value through leadership that drives change, growth outcomes from AI and data initiatives, and improved experiences.

“When leadership oversimplifies IT priorities like AI by reducing value to cost savings alone, it creates a flawed framework for evaluating innovation,” says Ha Hoang, CIO at Commvault. “The real opportunity isn’t just expense reduction; it’s capability expansion. And meaningful indicators of progress include improvements in operational efficiency, speed of decision-making, and customer or employee experience.”

Value problems start with leadership

The 2025 State of the CIO report highlights a part of the issue around IT’s potential value problem. Even though 82% of CIOs say their roles are becoming more digital- and innovation-focused, only 50% see themselves as business leaders. Is it a lack of confidence in collaborating with executives, gaps in understanding business operations, or a lingering cultural divide between business and IT?

Whatever the cause, CIOs who show up as tech leaders first have a harder time tying investments to outcomes and communicating how IT initiatives deliver business value. There’s an urgency here, as the Digital Leadership Report finds that digital leaders expect to stay with their employer for 3.3 years — relatively little time to demonstrate impact.

But it’s not just a leadership gap when business executives are underwhelmed by IT’s impact. The 2026 Technology Investment Management Report from Apptio highlights confidence gaps in technology investment decisions as well. The largest such gaps include 90% being unsure of an investment’s value or ROI, 84% distrusting the data, and 82% reporting misalignment with organizational objectives.

Recommendation: First, IT leaders must work to communicate IT’s value in business terms, aligned with strategic drivers, not in terms of what IT is doing technically or how it’s improving operations. Second, CIOs must capture the financial impacts from trusted data and AI, not just the qualitative benefits of improving data quality or instituting AI governance. Lastly, IT leaders should develop roadmaps that deliver value with every release, rather than communicating short- versus longer-term benefits.

AI amplifies the value gap

IT’s value gap may have gotten worse over the past year, as CIOs have struggled to deploy AI experiments into production and to deliver ROI from AI initiatives.

“IT never had a value problem, but it’s had a value articulation problem,” says Vikram Bhandari, chief technology and innovation officer at Riveron. “When AI ROI is framed purely as headcount reduction, IT gets boxed into a cost-center narrative. The real opportunity is using AI to scale revenue, reporting, and decision-making without linear cost growth. That’s how IT moves from cost center to strategic driver.”

It’s challenging to forecast and measure non-cost returns from AI investments, such as increased revenue and market share. Additionally, many AI initiatives start as experimental POCs, and organizational learning is required to identify and pursue optimal value drivers.  

“Measuring ROI on AI investments is critical, even when the return isn’t fully known upfront,” says Ryan Downing, VP and CIO of enterprise business solutions at Principal Financial Group. “What matters most is creating the space to test, learn, and pressure test assumptions so leaders can see where AI truly moves the needle. The key is aligning those early insights with the broader enterprise strategy so teams can scale what works and sunset what doesn’t. Over time, the real impact comes when those capabilities allow the organization to operate differently and unlock new growth.”

Recommendation: Focusing on AI’s productivity and workflow efficiencies can trap CIOs into cost benefits largely realized through headcount reductions. AI is only reshaping businesses, and AI agents are not yet driving digital transformation. CIOs focusing on use cases that drive revenue, deliver new products, or transform customer experiences are steps ahead of those who use AI only to optimize operations.  

Deliver business value through trusted data

CIOs will have to partner with CFOs to address any perceptions that IT is underdelivering on financial expectations. But before approaching the CFO, CIOs should first partner with the CMO on AI growth initiatives.

While 93% of marketers have a dedicated gen AI budget, only 8% are very confident in their organization’s AI governance, according to the report Marketers and AI: Navigating New Depths.

Therein lies a challenge CIOs can address through an AI governance program that balances guardrails with strategy. Focusing only on risk mitigation is one way CIOs paint themselves back into a compliance narrative rather than being a partner in growth.

CIOs need to do both, and one important way to accomplish this is to enable citizen analytics and develop trusted data products. By developing data products, CIOs can streamline much of the upfront data pipelines, governance, and management needed to deliver trusted data assets that people, tools, and AI can then use for different purposes.

“Creating a data product starts with knowing when it’s justified,” says Jed Dougherty, SVP of AI and platform at Dataiku. “Look for repeatable business decisions supported by reliable, well-understood data and infrastructure capable of meeting quality and availability expectations. Measure value by linking the product to business outcomes and adoption, tracking how widely it’s used and whether it improves the decisions or processes it supports.”

Recommendation: Product-based IT organizations developing data products aligned to AI strategies are seen as delivering business value to internal customers, with defined roadmaps and customer support.

Value through delightful experiences

Want a direct measure of IT’s value? Capture employee satisfaction (ESat) on the IT service desk, customer satisfaction (CSat) on digital tools provided to customers, and stakeholder satisfaction when delivering workflow-improving AI agents.

If satisfaction and usage aren’t improving, then chances are end-users are using alternatives. Inside the enterprise, that likely results in shadow IT, an opportunity for CIOs to step in and turn around capability or usability gaps.

“As CIOs, when ROI is not fully clear upfront, we focus first on the real problems teams are experiencing,” says Tomás Dostal Freire, CIO and head of business transformation at Miro. “If people create work-arounds or use unofficial tools, it is usually a strong signal that something in the workflow isn’t working. Our responsibility is to formalize what already proves effective and then measure improvements in speed, quality, or delivery.”

Delivering a delightful user experience and improving user satisfaction metrics don’t happen by having engineers glued to screens and focused only on implementation. As IT departments leverage AI’s coding capabilities or adopt vibe coding, there’s an opportunity to encourage more engineers to observe how people get work done and develop their business acumen.

Recommendation: Many SaaS platforms are overhauling their user experiences to showcase agentic AI capabilities. Workflow integrations and the use of MCP servers to connect AI agents may lead to SaaS platform evolution and consolidation. CIOs looking to demonstrate IT’s value will develop change management programs to help employees build AI literacy and transition to agentic experiences.

Recommendations for CIOs 

CIOs of world-class IT organizations recognize that developing meaningful business relationships, enabling employees to experiment with AI, and promoting lifelong learning are three key building blocks to developing an IT culture focused on delivering business value. IT’s portfolio of initiatives must include roadmaps tied to growth, and CIOs must lead communications about the business value delivered.

CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs present budgets, digital transformation programs, and risk management priorities to the C-suite and board with greater frequency these days. But IT leaders who aspire to C-level roles have few opportunities to show key executives what they know. So, being prepared for those 30 seconds caught in the proverbial elevator with the CEO or a board member is critical because it may be your only opportunity to make an impression that paves the way for future C-level opportunities.

To shine in these moments you’ll need to illustrate your business acumen and tell a story about how technology is delivering business value at your company. And while there isn’t one right way to answer an executive’s off-the-cuff question at the watercooler, the first rule for aspiring IT leaders is to be prepared to answer any business executive’s questions in a way that avoids technical jargon and leaves a lasting impression by knowing the business’s primary objectives, growth targets, and operational goals.

Below are five questions that IT leaders aspiring to CIO and CTO roles should know how to answer when asked. Together they build a foundation for showing you have the mettle to make good on your C-level aspirations.

How are IT’s key initiatives delivering business value?

At a recent Coffee With Digital Trailblazers, Joe Puglisi, growth strategist and fractional CIO at 10xnewco, hosted a contest among technology leaders on who delivered the best response to key questions IT leaders may face when running into business executives. His question, “What business value did your last cloud migration deliver?” drew answers such as, “It allowed me to recuperate some cost in infrastructure,” “It made sure we got faster speed to market,” and “It improved business agility compared to fragmented older systems.”

Those are solid enough answers, but specific results that qualify and ideally quantify the realized business value would be preferred in making that lasting impression. Puglisi advised starting the answer by stating the objectives of the cloud migration and then sharing the results. Heather May, president of May Executive Search, suggested treating executives like clients by aligning the response to their interests and including a key learning from the initiative.

Similar questions about typical IT initiatives, such as around the growing costs of cybersecurity, drew exemplary answers. For example, Joanne Friedman, PhD and CEO of Connektedminds, responded, “What is the cost of recuperating all of our customers, our brand value, and our production capabilities? If you look at that in comparison, investing in information security is actually less than what we should be spending.”

The key to answering such a question is to focus on value delivered from past initiatives and targeted in current ones. Describe the initiative minimally, and instead specify which executives and department leaders IT is partnering with to deliver the value. Lastly, select initiatives that align with the business’s top strategic priorities.

How are we using technology to drive growth?

Board members consider leveraging technology for productivity improvements table stakes for well-run IT organizations. What they and many business executives are more interested in are the growth and disruption opportunities afforded by technology investments.

“You can find a lot of people who can talk a lot about technology and deliver programs,” says Stijn Christiaens, co-founder and chief data citizen of Collibra. “Convince the higher-ups that your technical approach and AI solutions drive business value, monetization, and revenue.”

Ross Meyercord, CEO of Propel Software, says, “CIOs lead with foresight, setting the pace ahead of where the business is going.” He recommends answering the question by showcasing where IT is a catalyst for future revenue opportunities and how you’re developing in-house skills and partnerships to accelerate the delivery of new technology capabilities.

Review the company’s growth strategies from public filings, press releases, and internal presentations when preparing to answer this question. Focus on answering how the business plan drives growth and where technology investments are enablers. Avoid getting into the weeds on the technology, the plans to roll it out, or other implementation details unless specifically prompted by the executive.

What’s the biggest technology risk we’re facing today?

Ram Chakravarti, CTO of BMC Software, says to answer, “How are you helping me sleep well at night?” as a more relevant alternative to this key question.

Chakravarti suggests focusing your response on the solutions, strategy, and business impacts rather than diving into the latest security and operational risks. Your answer should help convey a message: “Relax, I have your back and am leading the company to be more operationally resilient.”

Chakravarti’s response to this question is, “By making sure the worst thing you can imagine never makes it to your inbox. We design for disruption, not just uptime, so we recover fast and stay operational when the unexpected happens. Every critical system has a plan B and a tested one at that.”

But there is a completely different approach to answering this question if your strengths lie in delivering innovations, customer experiences, and transformational outcomes. The biggest technology risk is falling behind competitors, losing customers, diminishing market share, and other disruptions if the company isn’t investing aggressively in technology and delivering outcomes from these investments. Answer the question on risks by highlighting where technology will improve competitiveness and the steps the organization is taking to deliver technology differentiators faster than the company’s competitors today and in the future.

A third approach to answering this type of question relates to how technology impacts the future of work, including people skills, job responsibilities, and workflow efficiencies. For example, Anant Adya, EVP of Infosys Cobalt, suggests using this prompt to answer, “How are you preparing your organization for an AI-first future?”

Rami Mazid, CIO at Nutanix, suggests answering a broader question on how you are enabling and reshaping the business. “Being a CIO is not really about running or managing the entire business. It’s about how that person will help transform the business and truly enable the employees to be the most productive in the work environment.”

What emerging technology should we be exploring now?

Any questions about technology investments and choices are trick questions. Most executives are not interested in implementation details or how the organization invests in emerging technology POCs.

Instead of diving into technobabble, IT leaders should focus on competitive differentiation, where technology enables growth, and how innovations improve customer experiences.

For example, generative AI is a hot topic right now, so it’s likely an executive will ask about where the company is investing in AI capabilities.

“It’s really about differentiation. Explain where you are introducing AI in your core products and services that are customer-facing and where the majority of the value is created,” says Dr. Philipp Herzig, CTO at SAP. “For example, underwriting in insurance, there’s a lot of room for innovation and differentiation right in the core products.”

When the media is covering a hot technology like gen AI, your answer should focus on where your organization is already delivering business value from AI and what new capabilities are on the near-term horizon. Share how you use AI agents in strategic platforms to improve productivity and enable highly impactful decision-making. For example, you might connect how AI is helping the organization optimize supply chains with the recent tariff announcements, then offer a second example of how the organization uses AI to improve customer experiences.

What is IT doing to improve its agility and effectiveness?

Executives with financial, technology, or operational backgrounds may ask about the IT department’s agility and effectiveness, which is really about how IT continuously improves its performance. Phillip Goericke, CTO of NMI, says to answer how IT creates leverage that drives enterprise value and to demonstrate that IT is not just overhead.

For example, Goericke suggested answering: “I build environments where others can make fast, high-quality decisions without me by giving them clarity, business context, and ownership, along with the freedom to experiment and make mistakes. My job isn’t just to run a great tech org — it’s to scale good business outcomes, accelerate growth, and increase the enterprise’s value as if I owned every share.”

Another approach to answer this question is to focus on a common problem facing IT departments and then demonstrate your solution.

For example, many organizations’ AI ambitions are held back by siloed applications and outdated data management practices. Manish Sood, CEO, founder, and chairman of Reltio, suggests answering, “To unlock AI’s full value, we need unified, trusted, real-time data in motion across every system, every interaction, and every touchpoint. We need to transition toward data-centric computing, where data — rather than applications — is treated as the enterprise’s most critical, long-term strategic asset.”

These questions come in many variants, and there’s always the oddball question that might come up. The best practice in handling executives’ questions is to avoid letting the mouth outpace the mind. Instead, pause, think, and then respond. Give your mind a chance to understand the question’s context and recall the executive’s background and interest. When you respond, focus on the business opportunity and value, not the technical details.

The path to the C‑suite doesn’t follow a playbook — but it does require the right leadership mindset. Explore what it takes to step into a C‑level technology role at CIO 100 Leadership Live, happening April 16 in Los Angeles. Designed for CIOs and senior IT leaders, this one‑day, in‑person event delivers unfiltered peer dialogue on transformation, enterprise data readiness, and leading large‑scale change across the enterprise.