There is no doubt that CIOs play a key role in pinpointing high-value use cases for AI. Nicole Coughlin, CIO of Cary, North Carolina’s IT department, said:
“Our job is to listen and really listen to the patterns and pain points in how work is done,” Coughlin said. Without this alignment between the CIO and the business, a realistic The value of AI You can’t create one, she said.
Pedro Antonio Martinez Puig, vice president of information services at Sibelco Group, says the CIO’s role in identifying high-value AI use cases is to marry ambition with reality.
“This starts with a deep understanding of your business portfolio, operational issues, and strategic priorities, because AI should never be a technology experiment; it needs to solve real problems and create measurable value,” Puig said.
With their observations in mind, let’s consider the general role of the CIO in AI, and then consider how to identify the CIO’s role. AI use cases We believe they deliver value and explain why CIOs must be translators of business value.
The CIO’s role in AI
When I think about the role of the CIO in AI, I see three factors at play:
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Educate business leaders about the impact and opportunities of AI.
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Co-create AI initiatives with business partners.
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Maintain alignment with CEO.
The CIO is the organization’s AI educator. It is important to bridge the gap between understanding AI and expanding its use. behavioral scientist David de Cremer says: “AI-savvy leaders” states that CIOs need to help business leaders realize the benefits of AI for the organization and its broader stakeholders. To do this, business leaders need to be able to ask questions, including about the data that makes AI possible.
CIOs act as co-creators and catalysts of change. Whether a CIO acts as an AI co-creator or an AI catalyst, the goal is the same. It’s about ensuring that AI is purpose-driven. Ethical issues are resolved early. This requires CIOs to be both AI visionaries and champions of AI vision in the business. For this to work, everyone needs to remember that AI supports what the organization stands for. “In local government, this often means finding places where AI can help people make better decisions, automate repetitive tasks, and improve equity and access,” Coughlin said, adding that it is wise to start small, measure often, and share successes to encourage others to take up the challenge.
The CIO works closely with the CEO. As the ultimate business sponsor of all business investments, CEOs are essential for organizations to embrace continuous learning and understand business agility. CIOs need CEOs who remain as focused on technology trends as they are on financial performance. At the same time, it is resistant to change. CIO needs CEO support It’s about involving employees in the change process from the beginning. This means technical and non-technical teams work in parallel.
Puig explains: “In my experience, this means working closely with business leaders to turn challenges into opportunities.” At his organization, predictive safety in operations, AI-powered customer insights, and end-to-end supply chain traceability are areas where technical and non-technical teams collaborate.
Leveraging AI: Key AI use cases
As discussed in Previous article In this series about AI-savvy CIOs, there are three types of AI you need to master: analytical AI, generative AI, and agent AI. Here we will discuss each in terms of use case categories.
Analytical AI. Of the three types, analytical AI It has been around the longest. use Historical data to make predictions It has also been applied to business problems such as customer churn modeling, A/B testing, and personalization. It is also widely used for anomaly detection and resource allocation.
Generative AI. ChatGPT launch in the second half of 2022 accelerates at once Generation AI (GenAI) into the public realm. This type of AI is used within companies for personal productivity, learning, and creative applications, with the goal of enabling employees to use AI in their daily work.
In the HBR Guide to Generative AI for Managers, Elisa Farri and Gabriele Rosani suggest that GenAI can be used for four unique purposes.
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To manage yourself. Here, generative AI helps in personal productivity, content generation, personal growth, and persuasive communication.
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help manage the team. Here, generative AI can help support team operations, support team creativity, team leadership, and complex problem solving.
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Business management. This includes data analysis, customer insights, business case development, and strategic decision making.
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Change management. This requires support for transformation, including the processes necessary to guide change.
Agent AI. As mentioned above, agent AI Combine analytical and generative AI and workflows to create new and improved business capabilities. Competency is the ability to consistently deliver specified results that are relevant to the business.
Agent functionality is about automation and intelligent orchestration. A new study from Harvard Business School and the Digital Data Design Institute shows that AI agents are becoming more than just sidekicks for human workers. They have become digital teammates, effectively creating a new talent category.
“Agentic AI is already transforming the workforce” Harvard Business Review May 22, 2025 Editionauthors Jen Stave, Ryan Kurt, and John Windsor recommend that CIOs and business leaders define competencies for human and non-human candidates. This includes identifying tasks that can be performed better, faster, or more cost-effectively by an AI agent.
Key elements include helping CIOs proactively shape how agenttic AI is integrated into their organizations. corporate labor strategy. Success begins with breaking down each role or project into its component tasks and results. This is similar to defining competencies for human candidates. In my role as an industry analyst, each tool I’ve seen demos allows me to capture this work before enabling automation.
Here, CIOs play a key role in helping organizations envision new ways to source and deploy talent, including permanent employees, temporary workers, freelancers, and AI. And finally, it includes demonstrating through metrics and KPIs that business outcomes are driven by the combination of people and AI.
CIO as translator of AI value
Throughout this process, an experienced CIO can play a valuable role as a translator, turning technical opportunities into business value. This includes evaluating AI opportunities for business efficiency and business transformation just like a seasoned venture capitalist would. Here, we help CIOs identify what’s really important to the business. Their job is to prioritize high-impact, achievable results over easy wins.
According to Puig, this includes “escaping the trap of endless pilots without clarity on how success will be measured or how the solution will scale. CIOs must adopt an architectural perspective to ensure feasibility within existing platforms and financial discipline to prioritize based on ROI and strategic impact.” Ultimately, the CIO must act as a bridge, turning data into decisions and innovation into results.
“CIOs have traditionally had to choose one path, hope it’s the right path, react to historical data, and make the best decisions with limited visibility,” said Ben Schein, chief analytics officer at Domo.
Agent AI changes this. This allows CIOs to consider multiple avenues in parallel, predict outcomes, and course-correct in real-time. There is an opportunity to not only tell companies what happened, but to help them understand what is possible.
A CIO who can act as a bridge between technology and business is worth their weight in gold. The most effective CIOs serve as educators, co-creators, and catalysts of change while closely aligning with business priorities. AI-savvy CIOIn particular, they recognize the distinct opportunities each type of AI presents and serve as critical translators to translate AI capabilities into sustainable operational efficiencies and meaningful business transformation.
