Our first report from this year’s research, ‘The Changing Role of the CIO’, found that 43% of CIOs are expected to contribute to revenue growth, an increase of 22% on the previous year. As such, the evolving role of the CIO appears to have led to the adoption of new technologies and innovation.
The 2019 Global CIO Survey found that 61% of companies are now using IoT technologies, which represents a 33% increase since last year’s survey. Similarly, 41% of organisations have deployed AI across the business, a figure which has more than doubled compared to the previous year’s 19%.
According to Forbes, these new technologies provide a definite competitive advantage to businesses that choose to invest in them.
However, our survey findings show that businesses are unable to see the benefits across different departments. For instance, under one in ten (9%) of respondents say their organisation is very successful at realising the business benefits of AI technology to improve customer service. Alarmingly, 44% of CIOs believe their organisation is not very successful at all.
IoT is also coming into the mainstream with CIOs stating the most common purposes as creating new products or services (26%), creating operational efficiencies (23%), and enhancing existing products (22%). However, similar to the use of AI, only 9% of CIOs believe that their organisation realises some business advantages.
So, what is the problem? What is hindering success? Our findings show that CIOs understand how these technologies can be beneficial to their organisation, but a disparity exists when it comes to reaping these advantages. To fulfil their newfound roles, CIOs must grasp the impact this gulf has in the broader business and understand how to close the gap.
The key to overcoming this is in the planning process. Expert input early on will help establish clear and measurable objectives, which can be further broken down into key performance indicators that track the impact of each new technology.
Key CIO findings
- 61% of businesses are now using IoT, a 33% increase since last year’s survey
- 41% of organisations are using AI in some manner, which has doubled from just 19% last year.
- Under one in ten (9%) of CIOs say they see some business benefits with their AI and IoT projects.
- The areas in which businesses are having the most success deploying AI technologies are IT (35%), marketing and sales (29%) and information security and compliance (28%).
