Driving innovation: key risks, opportunities and growth strategies for technology leaders

Executives cite the inability to deploy AI at a competitive pace (30%), challenges posed by AI laws and regulations (26%), and investor perceptions of AI strategy and impact (24%) as the top hurdles. Leaders also stress workforce readiness and measurable ROI to avoid PR-driven adoption. Protiviti helps organizations embed governance, privacy controls and operating practices so AI delivers sustained, enterprise-wide value.

Executives rank operations and legacy IT that cannot meet performance needs among their top risks over the next two to three years, highlighting gaps in scalability, integration, resilience and security. Many are accelerating mainframe modernization, cloud migration, and technical debt reduction to address these constraints, while also reassessing third-party dependencies that increase exposure. Protiviti helps organizations modernize platforms, rationalize complex application estates, and build cloud-ready architectures that improve performance and reduce operational risk.

Cybersecurity leads near-term investment at 42%, with data privacy at 39%; leaders are adopting AI-enabled threat detection, automated response workflows, and stronger identity and access controls. Security and privacy remain the top long-term challenge (50%), underscoring the need for resilient foundations. Protiviti helps build security first programs across cloud, platforms and data to reduce risk and improve resilience. 

Data privacy is treated as a strategic enabler with 39% planning near-term investment in privacy-by-design, data governance and embedded controls to support AI and analytics at scale. The rise of agentic AI heightens identity and access risk, requiring robust authentication, authorization and monitoring of autonomous agents. Protiviti helps establish governance frameworks and high quality, well controlled datasets so AI can scale safely and deliver value.

Third-party risk is a top near-term concern as vendor connections increase exposure beyond direct control, demanding more than “check-the-box” compliance. Leaders are assessing concentration risk and ecosystem resilience across cloud, platforms and APIs. Protiviti helps organizations strengthen resilience by building security foundations, improving governance, and reducing risk across core platforms and third‑party ecosystems.