The 12 most strategically important IT initiatives today

The strategic initiatives for found to be the key strategic initiatives for IT today.

When asked to list their most strategically important technology initiatives, CIOs put generative AI at the top, followed by agentic AI and then data/business analytics.

Security/risk management and automation of IT and business processes round out the top five.

Farther down the list are the more conventional IT tasks, such as modernization efforts, cloud management, and developing applications for and migrating applications to the cloud.

CIOs, executive advisers, and IT analysts say IT’s list of strategic initiatives shows how tech execs are spending more energy shaping and enabling their organizations’ strategies and desired business outcomes — and focusing less on technology excellence as their primary objective.

“CIOs are spearheading the IT architecture, organizational structures, and process transformation necessary to drive adoption and business value at enterprise scale,” the State of the CIO survey found.

Such shifts underscore the ongoing evolution of the CIO role from operational order-taker to transformation leader, with CIOs actively engaged with business leaders to drive AI adoption and focus on high-value outcomes from all technology initiatives.

How CIOs are spending their time in 2026 reflects this, with the study finding that CIOs are devoting more time to working more closely with business leaders on potential AI initiatives, learning about emerging tech, and creating a framework and organizational structure to support AI initiatives. Compared to last year, they’ve cut back on negotiating with IT vendors, managing IT crises, controlling costs, and managing expenses.

Tech enables new capabilities, products

Khanna’s focus reflects those findings. He’s prioritizing “new capabilities for the organization that are more differentiating and creating and launching new capabilities and products for clients in a more efficient way and at a faster pace,” he says — often through use of AI.

He’s also prioritizing projects that leverage data and analytics “to serve clients better and deliver products that fit market needs.” That includes, for example, incorporating large language models (LLMs) into analytics tools so that users can interrogate data using natural language.

And he’s doing all that with “cyber always top of mind” — a perennial task that requires constant attention.

“Given that cyber is a moving target, we need to work at staying current, modernizing, and staying ahead of the curve on what the bad actors are doing,” Khanna says. “That’s going to be a forever, ongoing focus.”

Scaling AI is the goal

, CIO of Tata Consultancy Services, considers transformation of the business as the strategic imperative for IT. Santhanam is using agentic AI to drive that. In the State of the CIO survey, 38% of respondents listed agentic AI as a strategically important tech initiative.

“Our most important initiative is redefining how our work gets done as an agentic enterprise,” he says, adding that the goal is to unlock “durable, nonlinear performance gains critical to our organization’s growth.”

As is the case with other CIOs, Santhanam has expanded his focus beyond IT infrastructure and even the IT realm to the whole organization to ensure success.

“In our view, this entails creating an AI-first culture amongst our workforce and resetting the operating model of internal functions and internal IT to one of ‘agents + apps + humans’ working together on intelligent decision‑making and autonomous execution,” he explains. “We have not just democratized AI infrastructure in the hands of all but also distributed agency to create 2x workers and teams.”

Furthermore, IT is reinventing processes across business departments to support desired business outcomes and add speed. Santhanam describes this work as creating “function-as-a-platform at scale.”

Reflecting another top strategic IT initiative identified in the State of the CIO survey, Santhanam stresses that IT has also prioritized security, privacy, and compliance as it advances its AI agenda.

Nearly all organizations have high hopes for agentic AI. An , senior managing director of FTI Consulting.

“IT must move to agentic AI that can execute workflows and make real-time decisions within guardrails,” Vural says, noting that this is an opportunity for CIOs to contribute to increased revenue and EBITA “rather than just saving hours with automation.”

That is shifting a metric of CIO success to how quickly they deliver “time to intelligence,” he adds.

A holistic perspective on IT initiatives

CIOs, however, are hitting roadblocks on that quest.

Legacy tech, immature data programs, and skills gaps are stymying CIO ambitions around agentic AI and their other top initiatives, Vural says.

Such challenges reinforce the need for CIOs to continue prioritizing fundamental IT work, says , CIO of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, says she doesn’t segregate some as strategic and others as not.

“I believe the most strategically important priorities for a CIO are often the ones that are not branded as standalone projects but instead underpin everything the organization does. In my view, three such initiatives are foundational to sustained success: innovation readiness, embedded cybersecurity, and organizational readiness,” she explains.

For Koinig, innovation readiness has become a defining capability. “Being ‘ready’ is no longer about keeping your asset management up-to-date or adopting a specific technology; it’s about continuously raising the bar of foundational work, including maintaining high-quality, governed data, ensuring collaboration, relevant input, and transparency in decision-making throughout key stakeholder layers, and sustaining operational discipline across systems and processes,” she says.

“Innovation readiness also requires a deliberate commitment to managing technical debt, routinely assessing the health of the technology landscape, and making conscious efforts to provide appropriate skills and capacity to move on actual mitigations,” she adds.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity “must evolve from a perceived constraint into an embedded capability within all functions — business as well as IT,” Koinig notes. It involves embedding best practices and requirements throughout the various units. “When done well, cybersecurity becomes organizational muscle memory that is intuitive, proactive, and inseparable from how work gets done, regardless of role.”

And then there’s organizational readiness — readiness for change, in particular.

“Innovation cannot take hold in environments that are culturally resistant or operationally unprepared to evolve,” Koinig says, noting that leaders must “intentionally cultivate a culture that embraces change as a constant, not a disruption, while aligning talent strategies to support that mindset.”