{"id":924487,"date":"2026-08-03T10:16:42","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/03\/ai-makes-its-case-against-the-business-savvy-cio\/"},"modified":"2026-08-03T10:16:42","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T15:16:42","slug":"ai-makes-its-case-against-the-business-savvy-cio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/08\/03\/ai-makes-its-case-against-the-business-savvy-cio\/","title":{"rendered":"AI makes its case against the \u2018business-savvy CIO\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Bob\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Opinion<\/span><\/p>\n

Jul 17, 2026<\/span>6 mins<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tIs it time for CIOs to be business people, not technology people, as the pundit class perennially claims? AI tells us no.\t\t\t<\/h2>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Once upon a time, there were actual arguments as to whether CIOs should be business people, not technology people. With any luck, these arguments were stomped out back here: \u201cThe case against the \u2018business-savvy CIO\u2019<\/a>\u201d \u2014 which drove the arguments for this false dichotomy into the ground back in 2018.<\/p>\n

Some complications have arisen in the near decade since, so I\u2019m afraid we need to revisit the subject \u2014 especially as the most recent of this has made the drumbeat for business-savvy CIOs that much louder.<\/p>\n

One source of this need was the case of the dreaded Digital adjectival abuse, also known as \u201cDigital as a Noun.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Digital<\/a> was a big deal back in the pre-COVID era. It matters here because for Digital to work, business leaders needed to be technologists, not just business people.<\/p>\n

As business leaders became better technologists, CIOs needed to keep up on the business potential for the various Digital technologies their business leader friends were suddenly asking for.<\/p>\n

Another source of confusion was COVID itself, and the discovery it led to on the part of those business executives not already convinced that the entire business ran on IT, and that any area that still relied on manual processes should be presumed incompetent. Rather than insisting on a full-blown ROI to justify automating a function, those relying on manual methods were (or should have been) asked to justify this choice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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AI changes the equation<\/h2>\n

But as tendentious or tectonic as those shifts might have seemed at the time, AI is raising the now-what-do-I-do? equation to new heights.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because CIOs are now being given a new set of alternatives:<\/p>\n