1. IT leaders feel rising pressure to minimise time to revenue for AI

A Flexential survey of 350 IT leaders at organisations with more than $100 million in annual revenue found that 93 per cent report a greater expectation to minimise time to revenue for AI-driven IT infrastructure, compared to five years ago. Executives also report many challenges to achieving those goals – including issues with scalability, security, workforce skills, sustainability and C-suite commitment – and 82 per cent say they’ve encountered performance issues with AI workloads over the past 12 months.

2. Two stark statistics reveal the contradictions of embracing AI

Of the 12,000-plus executives polled by Gartner for its CIO Report, some 92 per cent believe AI will be implemented in their organisations by 2025. At the same time, 49 per cent of those who are highly involved in AI strategy struggle to quantify or demonstrate the value of the technology, making the task of building even a basic business case impossible.

3. Meeting business technology demands is creating stress for CIOs

An IDC InfoBrief commissioned by Expereo that surveyed 650 technology leaders from large global enterprises found that 64 per cent find it “challenging and/or stressful to meet the technology demands of the business, and that AI is a key source of both pressure and opportunity”. Forty per cent believe the emerging position of chief AI officer (CAIO) could take over many CIO responsibilities within two years, and 38 per cent worry that AI could replace them or the role of their teams.

4. UK government releases findings on cybersecurity skills challenges

The UK government’s sixth year of research into the UK cybersecurity labour market finds that 44 per cent of businesses have skills gaps in basic technical areas. Gaps in incident management skills, meanwhile, have increased from 27 per cent in 2020 to 48 per cent in 2024.

5. Report: AI and security automation could cut 50 per cent from data breach costs

The Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 from IBM and Ponemon Institute is based on the experiences of 604 organisations and 3,556 cybersecurity and business leaders. This year, researchers found the average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million. But the report notes that better use of AI and automation could cut $2.2 million from the cost of a data breach.

6. Make sure that operational technology doesn’t provide a backdoor for cybercriminals

Operational technology is increasingly interconnected and inter-reliant, which increases the potential risk of a cybersecurity incident. Assessing and protecting your increasingly digitised estate of operational technology is more important than ever.

7. 70 per cent of CIOs are already deploying AI; Microsoft is winning the AI cloud infrastructure race

A Bloomberg Intelligence survey shows that CIOs are shifting spending from servers, storage and networking to large language model (LLM) deployment. Twice as many have active AI deployments compared to last year and Microsoft’s share of AI cloud spending is up 14 per cent, while Amazon Web Services is down 17 per cent.

8. How are state CIOs are already making use of AI and what tools are they choosing

The NASCIO State CIO Survey questioned 49 US state CIOs about nine topics, including the use of generative AI, which ranks as their number-three priority. Among their top use cases: meeting assistant services to support tasks such as transcriptions and use of AI to support and strengthen cybersecurity operations.

9. Revealing the people behind the CIO title

CIOs are said to be ambitious and passionate about what they do. According to a report from the UK-based agency Harvard, some 77 per cent of CIOs have ambitions to be CEO in the future and 90 per cent of CIOs feel valued in their roles. Some 81 per cent of CIOs would recommend the job as a career path for young people even though nearly 30 per cent believe their job has impacts on their mental health.