The CIO job has quietly become a different job

The title on the door still says chief information officer. The job underneath it has been rewritten.

The clearest evidence comes from Deloitte’s 2025 survey of more than 600 senior US technology leaders. Eighty percent said their roles and responsibilities have greatly expanded. Sixty-five percent now report directly to the CEO, up from 41 percent a decade earlier. More striking: 36 percent of CIOs now manage a profit-and-loss function, and just over half view technology as a revenue generator rather than a service centre. That is not an IT department. That is a business unit.

Foundry’s 2026 State of the CIO research, now in its 25th year, tells the same story from a different angle. Nearly half of respondents see the CIO as a business leader who proactively shapes technology decisions to drive outcomes, and 84 percent say the position has become more digital and innovation-focused. When CEOs set priorities for their technology chiefs, AI research and implementation now tops the list.

The AI mandate, and the gap underneath it

Here is the uncomfortable part. The same Foundry research found only 19 percent of IT leaders saying their AI initiatives have met or exceeded business goals. The remit has expanded faster than the results.

That gap shows up in the relationship with the corner office. Research covered for a New Zealand audience by IT Brief found 39 percent of CIOs are not in sync with their CEO on key decisions, and around a third do not feel empowered to make long-term IT strategy calls. The same study found 37 percent of CIOs now rate business strategy and stakeholder management as more critical to the role than technical expertise.

New neighbours in the C-suite

The CIO is no longer the only technology voice at the table. IBM’s study of 2,000 CEOs across 33 countries found 76 percent of organisations now have a chief AI officer, up from 26 percent a year earlier, which would make it one of the fastest-growing roles in business. Analysts covering the trend argue the arrival of CAIOs and chief data officers does not shrink the CIO role so much as force it to become sharper, more collaborative and more strategic.

And plenty of CIOs are looking past the role entirely. In the Deloitte research, 67 percent said they would like to pursue a CEO role in future, a higher share than any other technology leadership title surveyed.

The cost of carrying it all

The pressure is real. Reporting on technology leader burnout describes CIOs squeezed between board expectations of AI transformation and what their organisations can deliver. One CIO described working 20-hour days early in her tenure trying to cover everything, including AI, and admitted it was not sustainable. Others point to the mismatch between expectations and reality, rather than workload alone, as the thing that grinds leaders down.

The view from here

None of the big surveys break out New Zealand numbers, but the agenda has landed here all the same. This year’s TechXcelerate Aotearoa event in Auckland drew more than 300 senior technology and security leaders to wrestle with scaling AI responsibly, modernising legacy systems and aligning digital strategy with measurable business outcomes. Sound familiar? In a market our size, where one leader often wears the hats that three executives share offshore, the expanded remit is not a trend to watch. It is Tuesday.

The operator-to-leader shift is no longer an argument. The open question for New Zealand tech leaders is what has to change around the role, in reporting lines, in peer partnerships, in personal sustainability, so the people holding it can carry the bigger job without being consumed by it.