CEOs’ top priorities for IT leaders today

From growing the business to weathering economic uncertainties to remaking enterprise operations, CEOs today rely on their CIOs to help solve the top business challenges they face as chief executives.

That essential remit includes improving the enterprise’s ability to engage customers, collaborating with line-of-business executives to deliver innovative solutions, and safeguarding the organization against a wide variety of risks.

And CEOs are relying on CIOs to figure out how to use AI to do all that faster and at lower costs.

That’s the message from CIO.com’s 2025 State of the CIO Survey, which found that researching and implementing AI products and projects is the No. 1 CEO priority for IT today.

Other top CEO priorities include improving customer experience, strengthening IT and business alignment and collaboration, leading digital transformation initiatives, and upgrading IT and data security to reduce corporate risk.

“Driving revenue growth, improving customer engagement, making people more productive — these are evergreen goals, but now it’s also about AI and how to integrate AI into your tech stack and everything you do,” says Karl Chan, CEO of Laserfiche, maker of enterprise content management (ECM) and business process automation. “IT has to make that possible. There is a drive currently to transform the company with technology and with AI [specifically].”

The AI imperative

Artificial intelligence has been a dominant topic for CEOs since ChatGPT became part of the C-suite vernacular in November 2022.

Indeed, IT leaders identified AI as a top CEO priority for their IT departments in 2024’s State of the CIO survey as well.

However, CEOs have advanced the AI-related objectives they have for IT over the past year, observers say. In 2025, CEOs want CIOs to move beyond experimentation to deliver practical business value in collaboration with business leaders — whether through productivity or efficiency gains or through transformation.

“It’s using AI to disrupt the company, to remake the company, and to replace the existing business with a new one. That’s what CEOs are beginning to think about,” says Mark Taylor, CEO of the Society for Information Management, a nonprofit professional association. “There is going to be disruptive transformation [due to AI], and CEOs are trying to get out in front of it so they’re not disrupted by someone else.”

Taylor says CEOs are specifically looking for CIOs to use AI to bring more speed, agility, and accuracy to processes such as sales forecasting, as well as to radically boost worker productivity, significantly improve operational efficiency, and reimagine what they offer to customers.

“To one degree or another, AI will likely impact every dimension of the business at some point along the way,” he adds. “And because of its pervasive nature, it requires the CIO or CTO interfacing with everybody at the top level to work on the value creation side of it.”

In its 2025 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, research firm Gartner also notes the importance of AI to CEOs’ growth agendas.

“Far from just a tool, CEOs now see AI as transformative for creating dynamic capacity in core areas of the organization, including for retooling operating models and people strategies,” the firm writes.

In The Conference Board’s C-Suite Outlook 2025, 44% of surveyed CEOs said AI has made the biggest impact on workforce productivity, while 25% said AI made the biggest impact on customer satisfaction, 24% cited innovation, 18% on operational resilience, and 12% on marketing initiatives.

Wide-ranging IT priorities as economic concerns rise

Of course, AI isn’t the only topic top of mind for CEOs.

According to CIO.com’s State of the CIO survey, CEOs are charging their top IT execs with helping the organization achieve revenue growth objectives, identify data-driven business opportunities, reduce spending, improve employee experience, and enable new plans for customer acquisition and retention, in addition to the top five issues listed previously.

Geopolitical factors are placing additional pressures on CEO priorities, as global trade war, US-EU-China tensions, and global instability have become front-of-mind challenges for CEOs, according to The Conference Board survey, which found that 46% of CEOs see an economic downturn or recession as a high-impact issue for 2025. As a result, 80% of CEOs are looking to alter supply chains to lower costs and reduce the potential for disruptions, The Conference Board found — something CIOs can have a hand in analyzing.

CIOs are already shaking up their IT agendas in the wake of global tariffs, which the EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook Survey found is a concern for 98% of CEOs, who looking to product design innovations (42%) and cost management strategies (42%) in equal measure to mitigate the impact of increased tariffs.

Chuck Mitchell, senior director of content quality at The Conference Board, says CEOs are looking to CIOs to implement AI to address those areas of concern.

“When we ask about what’s going to drive profits, they’re really looking to AI to be part of that,” he explains.

Diane Gutiw, vice president and global AI research lead at CGI, an IT and business consulting services firm, also sees CEOs asking CIOs to help transform how work happens, wring costs out of that work, and find ways to be competitive in the marketplace.

But Gutiw acknowledges that most strategic CEOs don’t want their CIOs wedded to any specific technology solution — AI or otherwise.

“We need to focus on what’s the problem and then ask what the tools are to solve it,” she explains.

The CIO’s mandate

Joshua Bellendir, senior vice president of IT and CIO at retailer WHSmith North America, says the top priorities his CEO has for IT include improving cybersecurity as well as leveraging AI to improve operations, boost productivity, lower costs, improve customer experience, and innovate.

To address those priorities, Bellendir is using the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to strengthen the company’s security posture and reduce its risks. He’s also working with business users to identify where AI can have the biggest impact — such as in sales forecasting — with an eye toward scaling those initiatives. And he’s plotting where agentic AI can transform workflows to create cost-effective, highly productive processes where human workers and agents work together.

“It’s definitely a more pragmatic approach in terms of knowing how can we leverage AI for our business today,” he explains.

As senior vice president of IT and university CIO at the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Murphy has built an IT strategy that “underpins and is directly linked to” the university’s strategic plan. That plan includes advancing the university’s research mission and evolving the student journey while at the same time planning for market volatility in the form of funding, revenue, and enrollment uncertainties, he says.

To those ends, Murphy and his IT team are supporting the university’s recently launched Penn Advanced Research Computing Center (PARCC). They’re also developing student personas, studying how the university is meeting the needs of each one, and identifying where they can improve services and engagement — a process that requires Murphy to work with other executives “to define who owns the students” in an organization where so many divisions interact with them.

And Murphy’s IT team is advancing its “secure IT” program, looking to centralize commodity compute to reduce risks and save costs through efficiency gains.

And Murphy and his staff are doing all this while spending less money due to budget cuts.

Like others, they’re seizing on AI to address those objectives, transform operations, and drive down costs.

There’s a big incentive for such bold work, Murphy says.

“It’s a perfect time to do this, because we have a burning platform,” he says. “There is an existential threat, maybe, but we can position ourselves ahead of our competition by diving into this.”

Building the future

Whatever specific individual list of priorities they have for IT leaders, CEOs want IT to build for the future, says Keith Boone, tech strategy and advisory leader for North America and senior managing director at professional services firm Accenture.

However, many CEOs also “feel like [they’re] funding the enterprise of the old and not building the enterprise of the new,” Boone says.

As a result, Boone says CEOs are pushing CIOs to spend less of their IT budgets on run activities “to free up capital to drive new capabilities to build the enterprise of the new.”

For many organizations, this means recalibrating the IT agenda to make room for AI spend.

“CIOs need to be talking about value and business outcomes,” Boone explains.

They might, for example, identify uses of agentic AI that will increase sales productivity that could deliver an ROI in mere months or reduce call center hiring needs by 30%. But they must sell business leaders the art of the possible, he adds.

“There is return in this newest dimension of technology,” Boone says, “and CIOs have to demonstrate that they know how to get that return and go toe to toe with their business counterparts, because the CEO is looking to [the CIO] to change all the lines of the business.”