Enterprise AI is at a pivotal juncture the place CIOs should gauge the automation and productiveness advantages AI can carry whereas demonstrating how AI delivers ROI and enterprise worth to their organizations. A elementary requirement of the CIO job in 2026 will likely be to find out when launching new AI know-how stops being additive to a corporation’s purpose of building environment friendly workflows and lowering prices, defined Jay Upchurch, CIO for BI firm SAS .
That is the yr during which CIOs will transition into the function of “Chief Integration Officers,” figuring out combine current AI applied sciences inside their organizations as an alternative of frequently launching new AI methods, predicts Upchurch.
“The CIO function, particularly in ’26, goes to must be far more rooted in integration — integration between [AI] brokers and methods … after which ensuring that we’re doing that in a safe and ruled method,” Upchurch mentioned.
(Supply: Shane Snider/Knowledge Middle Data) 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 doable, mentioned Upchurch. Nevertheless, demonstrating ROI from launching these AI applied sciences hasn’t been simple, making a “cost-efficiency dilemma for all CIOs,” he mentioned.
He likens the issue in translating AI deployments into ROI to the early days of cloud computing and virtualization. Through the cloud transition, CIOs “needed to refactor all our workloads and reimagine how we ran with that,” he mentioned. “It is the identical method with AI — AI for automation’s sake is just not sufficient.”
The main focus now must be on combine current 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 corporation goes to make use of, based on Upchurch. For instance, SAS is a “Microsoft store,” he mentioned, so it is utilizing Microsoft Copilot because the foundational piece to make sure compatibility throughout current 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 most important AI platform, it is essential to have a basis that works throughout a number of IT methods, he underscored.
Integration choices: Construct vs. purchase. As soon as a CIO has chosen the foundational AI system, they will get to work on integrating that foundational AI with different AI applied sciences that the group has deployed. However CIOs ought to remember that this course of will take time as a result of AI applied sciences are nonetheless evolving, Upchurch mentioned.
“I’ll have an enterprise system that does not have an agent but that I can talk with,” he mentioned. “That does not imply I ought to rush and construct one. I must 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 concentrate on through the AI integration course of is safety, knowledge and entry, Upchurch mentioned. 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 figuring out what roles are, what [employees] are entitled to know from a knowledge standpoint — ensuring that label on all knowledge and the opposite methods is constant so you are not seeing belongings you should not,” he mentioned.
