[ad_1]
Enterprise AI is at a pivotal juncture the place CIOs should gauge the automation and productiveness advantages AI can deliver whereas demonstrating how AI delivers ROI and enterprise worth to their organizations. A basic requirement of the CIO job in 2026 shall be to find out when launching new AI know-how stops being additive to a company’s aim of creating environment friendly workflows and lowering prices, defined Jay Upchurch, CIO for BI firm SAS .
That is the yr by which CIOs will transition into the function of “Chief Integration Officers,” figuring out learn how to combine present AI applied sciences inside their organizations as an alternative of regularly launching new AI techniques, predicts Upchurch.
“The CIO function, particularly in ’26, goes to must be rather more rooted in integration — integration between [AI] brokers and techniques … after which ensuring that we’re doing that in a safe and ruled manner,” Upchurch stated.
(Supply: Shane Snider/Knowledge Heart Information) SAS CIO Jay Upchurch in a dialog with InformationWeek’s Kelsey Ziser.
Over the previous two years, CIOs have been pressured to implement Gen AI — and later agentic AI — as quick as attainable, stated Upchurch. Nonetheless, demonstrating ROI from launching these AI applied sciences hasn’t been straightforward, making a “cost-efficiency dilemma for all CIOs,” he stated.
He likens the issue in translating AI deployments into ROI to the early days of cloud computing and virtualization. In the course of the cloud transition, CIOs “needed to refactor all our workloads and reimagine how we ran with that,” he stated. “It is the identical manner with AI — AI for automation’s sake shouldn’t be sufficient.”
The main target now needs to be on learn how to combine present AI investments.
Managing the AI integration course of
Basis piece. The method for integrating AI applied sciences begins with figuring out the “agentic basis” that a company goes to make use of, in accordance with Upchurch. For instance, SAS is a “Microsoft store,” he stated, so it is utilizing Microsoft Copilot because the foundational piece to make sure compatibility throughout present productiveness instruments. “We’d like that digital assistant that may be a pure to our circulate of labor.”
No matter which vendor a CIO selects for the group’s fundamental AI platform, it is necessary to have a basis that works throughout a number of IT techniques, he underscored.
Integration choices: Construct vs. purchase. As soon as a CIO has chosen the foundational AI system, they’ll get to work on integrating that foundational AI with different AI applied sciences that the group has deployed. However CIOs ought to remember the fact that this course of will take time as a result of AI applied sciences are nonetheless evolving, Upchurch stated.
“I’ll have an enterprise system that does not have an agent but that I can talk with,” he stated. “That does not imply I ought to rush and construct one. I needs to be affected person sufficient that I pay cash to that enterprise software program vendor to allow them to present up with the agent that I can then combine in with. I haven’t got to construct all of it myself.”
Safety and governance. The third element that CIOs ought to deal with through the AI integration course of is safety, knowledge and entry, Upchurch stated. CIOs might want to be certain that staff have entry to solely knowledge that is related to their function.
“So when that agentic integration is going on, it is understanding what roles are, what [employees] are entitled to know from an information standpoint — ensuring that label on all knowledge and the opposite techniques is constant so you are not seeing belongings you should not,” he stated.
[ad_2]
