Only 20% of CIOs say AI met expectations. Here's what's missing. | | | | | | Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge! | This week: | Why culture, not technology, kills enterprise transformation (Anthony Enoh of Enbros Technologies joins me) CIO.com's annual survey shows AI ROI remains elusive for most IT leaders BCG finds 42% of AI users save a full day per week, but 66% get zero guidance on how to use it
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| | | | | 💡 Culture Will Kill Your Transformation Before Technology Ever Gets a Chance | | This week, we’re still featuring Anthony, CEO and Founder of Enbros Technologies. Anthony spent years in UK defence and intelligence before leading cyber transformation programs at PA Consulting and Atos across Northern Europe. He has seen enterprise transformation from every angle, and his take on the biggest blocker was blunt. | "Culture kills everything," Anthony told me. "Most people have the desire to change, but the will to change is rarely there." | That resonated. I see it constantly. We work with some forward-thinking companies that embrace new technology, but the majority of large organizations struggle with the same friction Anthony described. | He laid out the people-process-technology framework as a reminder that technology always comes last. "Technology supports a business process," he said. "There's a reason why PPT, people, process, technology in that order, has lasted." | Anthony shared a striking example from his last major engagement: a nuclear regulator. Their entire organizational DNA was built around not changing things. "When you work in those environments, the incentive is not to change," he explained. "This has been assured, signed and sealed. Do not change anything." Try delivering a technology transformation into an organization whose core fabric is about stability and risk aversion. | For CIOs leading transformation, the takeaway is clear: start with culture, not technology. Understand the organizational appetite for change before writing the first line of code. The best architecture in the world fails if the people using it refuse to move. | — Zack Tembi, CEO, SingleFin |
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| | | | | Less Than 20% of CIOs Say AI Has Met Expectations | | CIO.com's 25th annual State of the CIO survey of 662 IT leaders found that fewer than one in five report AI initiatives meeting expectations. Only 53% have established any formal approval process for AI projects, and less than half have defined metrics for measuring AI success. The survey signals a clear pivot: CIOs are moving away from open-ended experimentation toward structured governance, cross-functional oversight, and clearly defined KPIs as the baseline for scaling AI. | This tracks with what I hear from clients every week. The organizations seeing real returns are the ones that built the governance framework first and deployed AI second. If you still do not have formal approval workflows and success metrics for AI projects, you are running blind. The technology works. The organizational discipline around it is what separates winners from everyone else. | - Zack Tembi | Read the full story | AI Saves Workers a Full Day Per Week, But No One Tells Them What to Do With It | | Boston Consulting Group's fourth annual Global AI at Work Survey, covering 11,749 employees across 14 markets, found that 42% of regular AI users save more than a full day per week. The problem: 66% receive no guidance on how to redirect that time, and more than half do not channel it toward strategic work. The report, titled "AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools," argues that efficiency gains without workflow redesign produce no measurable business value. | The State of the CIO survey says AI is falling short of expectations. But BCG's data shows AI is already saving workers a full day per week. Both things can be true at the same time. The technology is delivering real efficiency gains. The problem is that most organizations have no mechanism to capture them. CIOs are measuring AI against ROI targets while their teams are quietly banking eight hours a week with no direction on where to reinvest it. The gap between "AI works" and "AI delivers value" is entirely an organizational design problem. | - Zack Tembi | Read the full story |
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| | | | | | 💡 CIO Spotlights | Margaret Cartwright appointed CIO for ACERTUS | | Previously SVP of Data Intelligence and Pricing Systems at US Foods ($36B revenue) Former CIO at AgAmerica, an agricultural lender Held senior roles at Tech Data (now TD Synnex, $60B IT solutions) Will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, AI, and digital initiatives Nearly three decades of leadership experience in enterprise transformation Read the full story
| Williams Racing (F1) taps Dr. James Smith as new CIO | | Over a decade at Google with experience at DeepMind Co-founder of Human Native AI Will build scalable AI infrastructure across the F1 organization Team principal James Vowles: "The latest battleground in F1 is the ability to harness data and AI across all parts of the team" Read the full story
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