Does The Ceo Doubt Your Ai Savvy? Cios Must Upskill In These 3 Critical Areas

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• AI implementations person surged by 282% successful 2025, according to Salesforce's yearly CIO study. 
  
• 94% of CIOs study that scaling AI forces them to grow their skills.
• The CIO and CEO business is broadening to thrust AI transformation. 

According to Salesforce's 2nd yearly CIO study, AI implementation has surged 282% since past year. Unlike successful 2024, erstwhile CIOs focused connected addressing information gaps, enhancing security, and conducting early pilots, they person now moved past that shape and are scaling AI crossed their organizations. In short, nan era of experimentation is over; nan era of standard is here. 

This displacement demands a alteration successful activity skills. While method expertise remains critical, leadership, storytelling, and alteration guidance now find nan occurrence of AI adoption. In fact, 94% of CIOs reported that scaling AI is forcing them to grow their accomplishment sets successful these areas.

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Enterprise AI take is besides expanding CIO roles. The business betwixt nan CIO and CEO is broadening beyond preparing exertion to steering organization-wide change. CIOs are now responsible for aligning executives, shaping take strategies, and ensuring AI is embedded into mundane work. 

These findings are important because CIOs must do a amended occupation of gaining CEO assurance regarding AI. According to a May 2025 Gartner survey, only 44% of CEOs considered their CIOs to beryllium "AI-savvy". This finding, based connected a study of 456 CEOs and elder business executives, showed a important deficiency of assurance successful nan C-suite's AI readiness, contempt 77% of CEOs believing AI will create a caller business era. 

Hands-on AI deployment

The Salesforce CIO study besides shows that CIOs are expanding their alignment pinch work leaders. Just nether two-thirds (65%) of CIOs activity much intimately pinch their customer work statement arsenic a consequence of agentic AI, which was much than each different groups. Given nan information and process maturity of work organizations, CIOs classed customer work arsenic number 1 for champion usage cases, astir enthusiasm, astir prepared, and highest take for agentic AI.

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Here are immoderate of nan cardinal findings of nan Salesforce CIO study: 

• Competitive edge: Last year, 43% of CIOs felt they were up of competitors connected AI; this year, that number accrued importantly to 61%.
• Implementation surge: Full AI implementation has seen a 282% summation since 2024, rising from 11% to 42%.
• Budget focus: AI fund has astir doubled, pinch CIOs now dedicating an estimated 30% of this fund specifically to agentic AI.
• Agentic AI adoption: As galore arsenic 96% of CIOs reported that their institution uses aliases plans to usage agentic AI wrong nan adjacent 2 years.
• CIO confidence: Three-quarters (75%) of CIOs reported emotion much assured successful their domiciled now than they did a twelvemonth ago.
• AI knowledge: As galore arsenic 97% of CIOs said they cognize much astir AI now than they did a twelvemonth ago. CIOs besides rated their companies arsenic importantly higher connected various AI factors this twelvemonth compared to 2024, specifically noting: improved worker accomplishment sets (+43%) and expertise to place occurrence metrics/KPIs for AI (+33%)

These results show that CIOs are moving from hesitation to hands-on deployment. This inclination is not astonishing fixed nan strategical value of AI successful business, including agentic AI. In 2026, according to nan latest research from Gartner, disruption is group to accelerate, and utilizing AI will not beryllium optional. 

From multi-agent systems to beingness systems, AI plays a important domiciled successful Gartner's database of nan astir strategical exertion trends for 2026. According to Gartner, by 2028, organizations that leverage multi-agent AI for 80% of customer-facing business processes will dominate. In addition, by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will beryllium AI supplier intermediated, pushing complete $15 trillion of B2B walk done AI supplier exchanges.

The information situation

The Salesforce CIO study shows that data trust remains nan biggest bottleneck for AI implementations:

• The superior fearfulness regarding AI is information information and privacy, followed intimately by a deficiency of trusted data.
• However, only 35% of CIOs are moving much intimately pinch main information officers arsenic a consequence of agentic AI, and only 14% of their IT fund is dedicated to information security.
• Just 23% of CIOs are wholly assured they are investing successful AI pinch built-in information governance.

Salesforce's recent State of Data and Analytics Report, based connected a study of 3,800 information and analytics leaders and 3,852 cross-functional business leaders worldwide, showed that AI supplier implementations are only arsenic bully arsenic nan information they tin access. 

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This investigation highlighted really data is simply a apical business priority -- 63% of business leaders described their organizations arsenic very data-driven, up 10% from 2023. Yet only 1 successful 2 business leaders was assured astir nan expertise to present timely business insights. The analytics study demonstrated that scaling AI requires cross-functional alignment, but gaps remain:

• 81% of CIOs reported that AI agents summation nan request for them to activity intimately pinch different groups (HR, finance, sales), yet little than half are presently doing so.
• 93% of CIOs believed nan successful take of AI agents hinges connected their integration wrong nan travel of mundane work.
• 61% of CIOs preferred investing successful known vendors. As 1 APAC CIO successful life sciences noted, "proper integration of AI-related technologies into nan broader exertion ecosystem" is simply a captious advancement needed for AI agents.

These points highlighted a clear request for improved soul collaboration and accrued finance successful information infrastructure to unlock nan imaginable of AI.

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The Salesforce CIO study revealed that CIOs are increasing their power beyond technology. They are becoming business translator leaders. CIOs activity much intimately pinch CEOs than immoderate different C-suite leaders, focusing connected agentic AI implementations. Nearly each CIOs (94%) opportunity AI agents person accrued nan request to grow their accomplishment sets. 

CIOs person enhanced nan pursuing areas to hole for agentic AI: activity skills (61%), storytelling and communicative building (57%), and alteration guidance and communications (55%). There whitethorn beryllium nary amended clip than now for CIOs to thief companies toggle shape into agentic enterprises.