You need look no further than this year’s Davos agenda to see that AI is once again set to define the year, impacting everything from the workplace and economy to sustainability and geopolitics. However, while the lasting impression from 2025 has been that AI is an over-hyped emerging technology marked by its novelty, AI in 2026 will start to be seen as a regular component of any global enterprise; just as we no longer blink an eye at our CSM or cloud systems.
Up until this point, enterprise AI agents have been solidly sitting within the experimentation and pilot stage. The companies that come out on top this year will be those that put agentic AI into practice, with measurable impact and ROI.
Powering those success stories will be the CIOs who drive the deployment. For CIOs, 2026 is a pivotal opportunity to influence the trajectory of their enterprise, but that involves facing the risks of an emerging technology head-on and making difficult choices about ownership, value and accountability.
Let’s explore how the coming year will redefine the CIO, workplace power and how we consider AI agents within the organisation.
The agentic era will give CIOs new strategic power
If implemented correctly across an enterprise, agentic AI has enormous transformative potential. Therefore, the CIO responsible for deploying the technology will have an elevated influence over the organisation as they are able to claim authority over the roll-out of that digital transformation.
However, agents aren’t yet living up to the hype. Money is being funnelled into AI, but we continue to see headlines dominated by stalled proofs of concept, ungoverned tool sprawl, or AI initiatives that never made it past the lab. With the International Monetary Fund having just warned that the global economy is at risk if AI falters, businesses must figure out how to get AI right, as quickly as possible.
As the adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility. With all eyes on AI, the CIO is in the hot seat, and the decisions they make when deploying agents will see them either sink or swim. Ambitious CIOs will step up, interpreting the situation as an opportunity to build their profile across the organisation and with the board. To create real impact, CIOs must build agents that improve core business functions.
AI will be aligned with core KPIs
Much of the AI use cases we’ve seen thus far have been fringe experiments; businesses are playing with agents that summarise research or write emails but don't go any deeper. But by restricting agents to surface-level tasks, we are also limiting the technology to surface-level impact. Enterprises remain cautious of AI so, in the name of reducing risk, too many agents are being developed on the periphery of the organisation and are not anchored to critical business operations.
CIOs must have the courage to trust AI with the business’ core processes if they want to produce real value from their investments, which currently 94% do not. It is only by integrating agents into the foundation of the organisation, that we can access its full potential.
Furthermore, the implementation of agents should be designed in line with the organisation’s KPIs. Aligning with the metrics that are most important to the business ensures the agents are producing results that really matter and are not arbitrary additions. An enterprise’s KPIs are a signpost for what is considered most valuable to the organisation. So, by using the KPIs as a North Star, CIOs can ensure that agentic applications are configured in the right direction.
Agents risk re-creating tech siloes
Ensuring all AI applications are aligned with the business KPIs also avoids agent sprawl. Some CIOs who are enthusiastic about AI may be quick to adopt a wide range of agents haphazardly, all from different providers, installed in different departments and feeding off different datasets. This risks creating insular tech siloes within the organisation.
SaaS sprawl was one of the biggest problems to emerge from the era of digital transformation, creating an unmanageable, disconnected tech stack. If agents are developed in isolation by different teams, organisations risk repeating their past mistakes just rebranded as agent sprawl. Any organisation that believes the more agents you have the better will face a new variation of technical debt.
As we’ve established, all AI applications should be connected to the core business KPIs to produce the most impact, which also eliminates any unnecessary pilots that will ultimately be inconsequential to the business. Additionally, when governed through a single control layer, the agents are guaranteed to align to the same objectives and standards and avoid a sprawling ecosystem of disconnected apps.
Also, agents that are connected to all the company’s existing applications, systems, data, processes and people will provide CIOs with a holistic oversight of the organisation. A thoroughly embedded agentic layer, elevates CIOs to a position from which their decisions disperse across the whole enterprise, defining its foundational infrastructure.
The CIO’s defining moment
As agentic AI moves from experimentation into the backbone of the enterprise, 2026 will mark a defining moment for CIOs. If AI applications aren’t delivering results that live up to the expectations of the hype cycle, it will be the CIO who is expected to provide the answers. Those who treat agents as isolated tools or add-ons will struggle to demonstrate impact.
On the other hand, CIOs who anchor agentic AI to core business processes, aligned with KPIs and embedded into a unifying connective layer will not only unlock real returns but also elevate their role within the organisation. This year is about CIOs laying the agentic foundations deep within their enterprise to set the trajectory for complete transformation.
