Transform, protect, respond: The CIO's mandate in an era of disruption

Cyber threats lead at 3.75 on a five-point impact scale, followed by disruptive innovation (3.57), economic conditions (3.53), privacy compliance (3.50) and AI implementation (3.48). Every one rose from 2026, with privacy and disruptive innovation climbing the most. Rather than creating entirely new risks, AI is amplifying existing ones around cybersecurity, privacy, regulation, workforce readiness and data.

CIOs are prioritizing modernization because legacy architecture has become a barrier to scaling AI. Infrastructure modernization rose to 35% as a top investment priority, up from 30%. Older systems may support isolated AI pilots, but scaling breaks down when they cannot support real-time data access, integration across siloed systems, elastic computing capacity, and secure, automated interactions among applications, models and agents. For CIOs, modernization is now about building an architecture capable of supporting enterprise AI.

CIOs are prioritising modernisation because legacy architecture has become a barrier to scaling AI. Infrastructure modernisation rose to 35% as a top investment priority, up from 30%. Older systems may support isolated AI pilots, but scaling breaks down when they cannot support real-time data access, integration across siloed systems, elastic computing capacity, and secure, automated interactions among applications, models and agents. For CIOs, modernisation is now about building an architecture capable of supporting enterprise AI.

Cybersecurity is technology leaders' top investment priority at 55%, up from 42%, and cyber threats remain their top near-term risk at 3.75, up from 3.58. Advances in frontier AI models are creating new attack capabilities that compress already short reaction times, which increases the importance of core disciplines like identity, access and vulnerability management. Only 46% of technology leaders report high confidence in their ability to protect the enterprise.

45% rank integrating AI with existing technologies, processes and the workforce as a top priority, followed by equipping the workforce (43%) and securing the data used to train or run AI models (37%). The focus has moved from deploying AI to governing and integrating it. AI also tends to amplify existing strengths and weaknesses, exposing gaps in security, data governance and operational maturity that CIOs need to close.

51% are highly confident they can transform the enterprise, but that drops to 46% for protecting it and 42% for responding with agility. Transformation follows a defined roadmap; responding to the unexpected requires fast coordination across technology, security, operations, legal and business leaders. Advances in frontier AI models are also creating new attack capabilities that compress already short reaction times.