CIOsurge

Where Is the Human in the Loop?

Steven’s LinkedIn

Food distribution has a reputation for adopting technology late, yet Steven Singer has put AI to real use as CIO and COO of a 110-plus-year-old distributor. When I asked what it took to get past the resistance, he went straight to governance.

For chat tools, that means rules and guardrails to keep hallucinations down. For agents with some autonomy, he wants a clear answer on where people fit in.

"the term is called human in the loop, right? But where in the loop is the human being? At what point in time? Is it past tense and too late where they're trying to fix an issue?"

His preference is to use AI as augmentation, where people see problems ahead of time and stay in control. Software development is his top example. A developer who can already write code on their own can save six to ten times the time by using a large language model to fill the gaps.

Holding both roles gives Steven two scorecards. The CIO in him values that developer productivity. The COO in him measures something else.

"show me the cash in the bank, show me the automation and collections, show me the things that you can do to make sure that the sales team is hitting quotas."

So he ties automation to early warning. Instead of an end-of-quarter conversation about missed numbers, reporting flags a salesperson's trend two or three weeks in, while there's still time to help them hit quota and earn their commission.

He admits the dual role creates tension, and sometimes that tension is internal.

"sometimes I'm arguing with myself, well, what's the CIO side versus what does the business actually need"

The takeaway for technology leaders: before you deploy an agent, decide exactly where the human sits in the loop, ahead of the action or after the damage. Then measure the result the way your COO would, in cash, collections, and quota.

🗓️ CIOsurge Executive Forums

Our closed-door dinners for CIOs, CISOs, and senior IT leaders. Off the record, with no vendor pitches. Seats are limited, and every registration is approved by our team.

New York | Thursday, October 8
Realizing AI ROI: Governing the Ecosystem Behind It
At Riverpark, with panelists Devon Bryan (Booking Holdings), Christopher Frenz (Rectangle Health), and Vamsi Tammana (Legend Biotech).
Request an invite

Los Angeles | Thursday, October 22
Realizing AI ROI: Governing the Ecosystem Behind It
At Perch, with panelists including Jeff Blair (CAA), Nick Reva (DoorDash), and former Dell CISO Tim Youngblood. I'll be moderating.
Request an invite

Atlanta | Tuesday, December 8
Proving ROI on AI Beyond the Pilot
At Chops Lobster Bar. Panel to be announced.
Request an invite

AI Coding Gains Are Disappearing Into the Review Queue

CIO Dive

Bain & Co.'s 2026 Global Technology Report, based on a survey of nearly 300 senior technology leaders, found that AI coding tools help developers finish roughly 21% more tasks. The catch is that time spent reviewing AI output rose 91%. Developers are also juggling 47% more simultaneous workstreams, a sign that AI is generating work faster than teams can absorb it. Bain partner Purna Doddapaneni told CIO Dive the constraint has shifted from producing code to trusting it, since each change still needs a person to understand, test, and secure it.

This lines up with what Steven Singer told me in this week's interview. A developer who already knows how to code gets six to ten times the leverage from these tools. Someone who can't judge the output just produces more of it for someone else to check. So before you buy another coding assistant, look hard at your review capacity. Who signs off on AI-generated code, how long does it sit in the queue, and what happens when it ships without a real review? If you can't answer those three questions, your productivity gains are piling up as risk. Budget for reviewers the same way you budget for licenses.

— Zack Tembi

Skills Gaps Cost Most Companies $250K or More Last Year

CIO DIve

A new Pluralsight report found most businesses wasted $250,000 or more last year because their teams' expertise didn't match their project ambitions. Cloud, cybersecurity, and AI projects were the most likely to be derailed, and 84% of tech leaders said skills gaps push projects over budget at least some of the time. More than three-quarters said they've watched employees finish training or earn certifications and still struggle to apply those skills on the job. CIO Dive also points to Randstad Digital research showing companies routinely spend more on AI platforms than on training people to use them.

That certification number should worry every CIO who reports training completion as progress. A badge proves someone finished the course. Whether they can do the work under pressure is a separate question. I'd rather see a team prove a skill on a live project, with a senior person reviewing the output, than collect another round of certificates. And before you greenlight the next cloud or AI initiative, run an honest skills check against the plan. Finding the gap in week one is cheap. Finding it in month six is how you end up as a statistic in next year's version of this report.

— Zack Tembi

FortiMail zero-day under active attack, CISA sets 3-day patch deadline

🗞️ At A Glance

GitLab patches critical 9.9 flaw in its AI Gateway

Police dismantle KillSec ransomware gang allegedly run by a 16-year-old

Meta launches an enterprise AI business, poaches MongoDB's CEO to run it

LaunchDarkly saves $50K a year with tier 1 IT support agents

Apple to flag AI requests for Mac data after Meta's Muse draws complaints

💡 CIO Spotlights

Nishit Sahay, Chief Information Officer, Altera

LinkedIn

Joins Altera, the world's largest pure-play FPGA solutions provider, as CIO
Previously SVP and CIO at Marvell Technology, where he led corporate IT, the Data Office, and enterprise AI initiatives
Background in large-scale digital transformation, business process optimization, and technology integration
Mandate covers Altera's global technology strategy, with a focus on cybersecurity, expanding the use of data, and enterprise AI
CEO Raghib Hussain expects the hire to strengthen infrastructure, simplify how teams work, and give employees better tools
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, W.E. O'Neil Construction

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Triumph Financial

CIO, Amplify

CIO, WPM Real Estate Management

CIO, Goodwill Industries of Greater New York and Northern New Jersey

The agent made the call. You own it.

Zack Tembi — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The agent made the call. You own it.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

In this edition:

Steven Singer on why he started his digital transformation in the warehouse
Why AI governance is eating a full day of every leader's week
What siloed AI agents say about siloed teams

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Start at the Receiving Dock: Learn the Business Before You Change It

Steven’s LinkedIn

Steven Singer is the CIO and COO of a 110-plus-year-old food distribution company, and when he joined, the owners told him they wanted digital transformation. Steven's first move was to leave the office. He went out on deliveries, worked with the night shift, and spent time on the receiving dock.

"I started in the warehouse, going out on deliveries, working with the night shift to figure out how they pick their orders, you know, getting out there with the receiving dock and truly unpacking pallets in some cases and learning the inefficiencies"

He had come from the rentals industry, where everything that went out the door came back. Food distribution works differently, so he sat in the forklift, learned how the pallet racks worked, and watched the people and processes for months.

"And really working side by side, gaining trust by doing the job with them, alongside them, not above them, not in a capacity that I'm your boss, but in the capacity that I'm a true leader here to learn and observe and support you every which way that we can."

The small wins came first. The porter who empties the trash now works from a tablet app instead of a piece of paper. The receiving team has IoT devices and screens showing which trucks are running late. Each win built momentum for the next.

"And that becomes that steamroll of a boulder down the mountain, right? Where that little itty bitty snowball becomes this colossus, you know, of size of landslide."

Steven carries the same approach into every rollout. He skips forced training. He puts the old way and the new way next to each other and does the work with the person, so they see the gain for themselves.

"What I find is if you show them how they're doing it today, and then you show them a way to do it without it, and you put them side by side and you do it with them, right, not forced training, but literally side by side so they can see the gains, they usually fall into what's easier, right?"

The takeaway for technology leaders: before you transform a business, go do the work at its front door, whether that's the receiving dock or the order desk. Trust earned alongside the people doing the job makes every rollout after it easier.

AI governance is eating a day of every leader's week

CIO.com

Four in five senior decision-makers, including CIOs, CISOs, and CDOs, now spend more of their day managing AI risk, and their working hours are up 26% on average because of it, according to a OneTrust survey reported by CIO. The incidents are piling up too. Eighty-six percent of respondents have reported an AI-related incident, and more than a quarter have seen AI systems take unapproved actions at least twice.

A third say employees turned to unapproved AI because the approved tools or processes weren't available fast enough. Viren Meghani of Tata Consultancy Services says most of the extra hours go to chasing down unapproved tools rather than overseeing approved ones. Conal Gallagher, CIO and CISO at Flexera, says his team slows deployment when it doesn't understand the risk well enough and makes sure agents get no more access than they actually need.

The number I keep coming back to is that one in three. A third of organizations watched employees go around the approved path because it was too slow. That's Roberta's dentist problem with an AI twist. When security and IT feel like an appointment people dread, people skip the appointment and grab whatever tool works.

The fix starts with the relationship. If the head of marketing already knows your team and trusts that asking won't mean a three-week wait, the new AI tool comes to you first, and your hours go to building controls instead of investigating what somebody already deployed.

Pick the two or three business units generating the most shadow AI and go talk to them this month. Ask what they needed that the approved path couldn't give them. You'll get your governance roadmap from those conversations.

— Zack Tembi

Enterprises are betting big on AI agents that don't talk to each other

CIO DIve

Two-thirds of organizations now run AI agents in production and plan to increase them sixfold by next year, yet only 29% of those agents interact with one another. That's according to an IDC survey of more than 400 enterprise technology decision-makers, conducted for agentic AI company Leah and reported by CIO Dive.

Just 7% of enterprises have advanced orchestration where multiple agents collaborate, and more than half rely on basic, workflow-based handoffs. The visibility gap is just as wide: separate New Relic data published this week found that one in four AI agents runs unmonitored. Leah's president and CTO compared enterprise AI today to a thousand instruments playing at once without a conductor.

Siloed agents usually trace back to siloed teams. Finance builds an agent, customer service builds another, IT builds a third, and nobody talks to each other because the humans who own them don't. You can't orchestrate agents across departments if the people running those departments have never compared notes.

That's also where the one in four unmonitored agents comes from. Nobody hides an agent on purpose. It just gets built by someone who didn't know who to tell. At SingleFin we treat agents like employees, with names and scoped roles, and that model only works when every agent has an owner who is actually in the conversation.

Before you buy an orchestration layer, map who owns every agent in production and get those owners in a room together. The technical integration gets a lot easier once the people are connected.

— Zack Tembi

OpenAI agent breaches Australia's Medicare portal during a research task

🗞️ At A Glance

One operator, three open-source agents, 27 companies breached

AI spending squeezes IT modernization budgets

Disney names Karandeep Anand its first CTO

CISA: Ransomware gangs now exploiting critical TeamCity flaw

Irish regulator fines Google about $462M over location data

💡 CIO Spotlights

Arthur Hu, Chief Information and Digital Officer, BD

LinkedIn

Joins BD (NYSE: BDX) as chief information and digital officer, succeeding Denise Russell Fleming, who retires at the end of this year
Comes from Lenovo Group, where he served as global CIO and helped lead AI adoption and business transformation
Spent 17 years at Lenovo, including time as chief technology and delivery officer for its solutions and services group
BD CEO Tom Polen says Hu will modernize the enterprise and embed AI into how the company works
Arrives as BD pushes to become more of a technology solutions provider alongside its connected devices, including its AI-powered Incada connected care platform
Read the full story

Amy Jones, CIO, LoanCare

LinkedIn

Named CIO of LoanCare, the national mortgage subservicer that is part of Fortune 500 company Fidelity National Financial
Brings more than two decades of technology and digital transformation experience across mortgage lending, financial services, and healthcare
Spent more than 15 years at Wells Fargo, including five years as a technology executive supporting home lending servicing
Most recently served as VP of customer technology and experience at Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Will focus on using AI to improve efficiency, reduce compliance and operational risk, and improve the experience for borrowers and servicing clients
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Florida Orthopaedic Institute

🤝 Jobs

CIO, nVent

CIO, Bennett College

CIO, Ford Office Technologies

$2.7 trillion and the process is still broken

Zack Tembi — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:39:02 +0000

$2.7 trillion and the process is still broken

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

In this edition:

Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, on why your issue is probably your process, not your tool
Why 72% of AI decision-makers say failures start with poor data, not poor models
The Agile cautionary tale, and why AI is walking the same path

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Your Problem Is Probably Your Process, Not Another Tool

Roberta’s LinkedIn

When I asked Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, how she positions a security budget to the board, she started somewhere I did not expect. Not with the pitch, but with a warning about the instinct most of us have when we walk into a new environment and see a gap.

Roberta credits her military background for teaching her to operate on a light budget and treat anything extra as a bonus. That discipline shapes how she diagnoses problems. The mistake she sees leaders make over and over is reaching for a purchase order first.

"A lot of times you really don't need this next new thing. And you have to ask yourself, do we really need this new thing or do we need to be more efficient with what we have?"

She is not anti-tool. She loves tools, and she was clear you need your GRC platform, your SIEM, your vulnerability management. The problem is using a tool to paper over something a tool cannot fix.

"More than likely, your issue is your process and not your tool."

The failure mode is a stack full of software sitting on top of broken process. As she put it, people throw a tool at a problem, end up with a pile of tools, and still have the same messed-up process underneath because they never fixed it. Band-aids on a gaping wound.

So her first move coming into a role is not shopping. It is looking at process. And the timing pressure only makes the discipline more important, because the pace of new tools is relentless.

"There's going to be new tools coming out every single day, every week."

The right response to that firehose is not to spend your time evaluating all of it. It is to stay anchored on what matters to the business and resist the pull to investigate every shiny new option.

The takeaway for technology leaders: before you write the check, ask whether the gap is a capability you are missing or a process you have not fixed. New tools will keep arriving faster than you can assess them, so let business impact, not novelty, decide what earns a place in your stack.

Your AI Agents Are Only as Smart as the Data Underneath

CIO Dive

A new Collibra study conducted by Harris Poll puts a number on what a lot of us have been seeing firsthand. When enterprise AI initiatives fall short, 72% of AI decision-makers say the root cause is a poor data foundation. Not the model. Not the vendor. The data underneath.

The survey of 300 data and AI decision-makers found that 87% of teams are regularly checking that the context available for AI agents remains accurate and current. More than half said employees spend hours manually reviewing and correcting AI agent outputs. That is the opposite of what these tools were supposed to deliver.

The structural problem is that enterprise data was built for humans reading dashboards and running analyses. Agents do not work that way. When a definition is ambiguous or context is missing, an agent will still produce an answer and act on it. So the work is not just cleaning up more data. It is making context available in a form machines can understand and use.

This is the part that should worry you: 53% of decision-makers are now moving their AI function's reporting line closer to the data organization. That is a structural admission that we built AI on top of a foundation that was never designed for it. If you are a CIO evaluating your next AI investment, start with the data layer. No agent is smarter than the data it reads. And if your team is spending hours manually checking agent outputs, you do not have an AI deployment. You have a very expensive intern.

— Zack Tembi

AI is retracing the Agile mistake, and the blast radius is bigger

CIO DIve

A new CIO Dive opinion piece draws a line between AI adoption and the Agile movement, and the comparison should make every technology leader uncomfortable. Agile started as a revolt against processes that smothered the work. It delivered real results. And then it got hijacked by frameworks, certifications, and coaches who had never shipped anything. Twenty years later, "we're Agile" tells you nothing about whether a team can actually deliver.

AI is now walking the same path. But the blast radius is bigger, because it reaches every job built on knowledge work. The core failure mode is the same: bolting a model onto a process built for humans doing every step by hand. That just makes a broken workflow slightly faster.

The teams getting real leverage are tearing the workflow down to its purpose and rebuilding it around what the tool can now do, removing handoffs, review layers, and steps that only existed because the old way was done at a human's pace. Just 39% of organizations report any EBIT impact from AI, according to McKinsey, and most of them under 5%.

I lived through the Agile wave. I watched organizations spend millions on certifications and ceremonies while the actual delivery stayed the same. The lesson was simple: if you rename the meetings but do not change the work, you get the same result with new vocabulary. AI is doing this right now. The companies winning are the ones redesigning the work, not decorating it. If your AI initiative is a layer on top of an untouched process, you are building Agile 2.0, and you already know how that ended.

— Zack Tembi

McKinsey's 2026 Technology Trends Outlook finds AI infrastructure spending doubled in a single year

🗞️ At A Glance

AI agents are going rogue, and CIOs are racing to put guardrails around them

Oracle's September patches address five max-severity Fusion Middleware flaws

Global AI spend forecast hits $2.7T in 2026, up 49.5% year over year

OpenAI discloses six new agent misalignment incidents, including prompt injection and credential searches

Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft call for AI development slowdown, citing safety gaps

💡 CIO Spotlights

Dr. Ashish Shrivastava, Chief Information Officer, Radico Khaitan

LinkedIn

Named CIO of Radico Khaitan, the Indian spirits and liquor company, to lead AI-driven digital transformation, enterprise technology strategy, and digital innovation
Brings more than 25 years of technology leadership experience spanning banking, retail, manufacturing, media, telecom, government, and technology services
Previously served as Head of Technology and Business Head of Digital Engineering at Financial Software & Systems (FSS), overseeing a hosted business valued at more than ₹500 crore and a 600-member banking transformation service
Earlier career includes CIO roles at Allied Blenders & Distillers and CMS Infosystems, and enterprise technology leadership at Reliance Retail covering SAP, AI/RPA, IoT, and cybersecurity across 20,000+ retail outlets
Also served as Chief Technology Officer at the Punjab State E-Governance Society, leading digital transformation across 30 million citizens, 800 services, and 100 applications
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, American Integrity Insurance Company

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Sandia Area Federal Credit Union

CIO, St. Olaf College

The blame for AI just landed on your desk

Zack Tembi — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The blame for AI just landed on your desk

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, on why the career-changer you keep filtering out is the hire you actually need
Why 52% of tech leaders now put AI failures on the CIO, often without giving the CIO the authority to prevent them
How the CIO role is shifting from running technology to deciding where agents are allowed to run

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Hire the Career-Changer: One CISO's Case for a Wider Pipeline

Roberta’s LinkedIn

I asked Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, what CIOs and CISOs can actually do to build a wider hiring pipeline. Her answer was practical, and it started earlier in the funnel than most hiring conversations do.

The first move is awareness. A lot of people never enter the field because they have no idea how big it is. Everyone has seen the hacker on TV. Almost no one has seen the GRC analyst or the policy specialist.

"There's just such a wealth of opportunity in our field that people don't even know exist. So a lot of it is just getting out there and letting that knowledge be expressed so people know what is even an opportunity for them."

Roberta speaks at high schools and colleges for exactly this reason. But the part that will matter most to hiring managers in our community is what she said about the top of the funnel. Stop gatekeeping on years of experience.

The feedback she keeps hearing from the people she mentors is that they cannot get in at all, because every posting demands five or ten years. Meanwhile there are eager people with a single year of experience, or coming from an entirely different field, who never get a shot. And here is the reframe. Those different backgrounds are not deficits. They are advantages.

"Someone who has worked in healthcare understands the intricacies of the healthcare applications in HIPAA way better than anyone else. Someone coming in as a teacher understands FERPA and all this stuff within the applications way better than anyone else. A military vet really understands the security behind things and the discipline way better than anyone else."

Roberta lived this herself, moving from pre-med to the military to security. The lesson for hiring managers is to be open to the varied backgrounds of the people applying, rather than filtering them out for not having the standard resume.

The second half of the job is what happens after the hire. She pointed to the mid-career cliffs she writes about, and the fix is sponsorship. Promote your people, listen to them when promotion time comes, and help them reach the senior director and CISO roles they are aiming for.

The takeaway for technology leaders: widen the top of your funnel by recruiting career-changers and treating their prior domain as an asset, then close the loop by actively sponsoring the people you hire so they do not stall at the cliff.

CIOs bear the brunt of blame over AI mistakes

CIO Dive

A new 8x8 survey puts a number on something a lot of us have felt coming. More than half of tech leaders, 52%, say the CIO is the one held accountable when an AI agent makes an error. That is far ahead of anyone else in the building, with customer service leadership at 16% and legal or compliance at 6%. Censuswide surveyed more than 2,500 CIOs and CTOs across the US, UK, France, Australia, and Ireland in July. The gap that should worry you is the one between accountability and control. You may not have picked the vendor, and you may not have access to its audit trail, but when the agent gets it wrong, the room turns to you.

This is the bill coming due for two years of AI showing up through the side door. Business units bought tools, teams wired agents into workflows, and nobody stopped to ask who owns the outcome when one of them acts badly. Now we know. It is you. The accountability is not going back in the box, so do not waste energy on the unfairness of it. Convert it into leverage. If you are the last line of defense, you have a clean business case for the governance, the audit access, and the single view across everything the company already bought. Take this survey into your next budget conversation. Accountability without authority is the strongest argument you will ever have for the control you have been asking for.

Now more than ever, CIOs need to be change agents

CIO DIve

Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, argues in CIO Dive that the job has moved under our feet. The role used to center on delivering reliable infrastructure and secure systems on a predictable timetable. With AI agents now acting inside real workflows, making decisions and navigating ambiguity without a human in the loop, the CIO's work is pushing past technology deployment into something harder. Defining where an agent gets to operate on its own, and where it stays out of the business entirely, is becoming a core part of the job.

Put this next to feature one and the shape of the year gets clear. One story says you will answer for what the agents do. This one says deciding what they are even allowed to do is now your table. Same responsibility, described from two directions. The uncomfortable read is that keeping the systems up is no longer where the value of this seat lives. The value is in the judgment. Which processes can a machine run end to end, which need a human hand on them, and which should never be handed over no matter how good the agent looks in a demo. That is a business risk decision, and it is landing on the CIO because nobody else in the org is positioned to make it. Start writing those lines down now, before an incident writes them for you.

— Zack Tembi

A Russian-speaking attacker used hundreds of AI agents to exploit PaperCut flaws and breach 395 organizations in 48 countries

🗞️ At A Glance

Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday fixes a record 974 CVEs, including two exploited zero-days

Anthropic's new threat report: ShinyHunters used Claude to scan 1.8M Android apps for secrets, and Russian spies used it to rebuild detected malware

Bain: AI could shift $4.7 trillion in corporate profits, a bigger shock than the internet

Sysco targets $500M in AI-driven savings from routing and inventory forecasting

💡 CIO Spotlights

Ram Komarraju, Chief Information Officer, Freshfields

LinkedIn

Named CIO of Freshfields, the global law firm, as it accelerates technology, innovation, and AI as strategic drivers of client service and growth
Joins from CLS, a global financial market infrastructure group that settles roughly $8 trillion in foreign exchange payment instructions a day, owned by more than 70 major financial institutions
Most recently served as CLS managing director of technology, leading strategy, architecture, engineering, and data and analytics in a highly regulated environment
Will shape Freshfields' long-term technology, innovation, and AI strategy and lead the evolution of its global platforms
Succeeds Christopher Smith, who left the firm earlier this year
Read the full story

Oded Blatman, Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer, Ledger

LinkedIn

Named CIO and CSO of Ledger, the digital asset security company, reporting directly to Chairman and CEO Pascal Gauthier
Will lead cyber and infrastructure security, product security including the Donjon, security operations, enterprise risk management, and internal IT
Joins from Fireblocks, where he spent five years as CIO and CISO building the company's global security and enterprise technology organizations through rapid international expansion
Earlier served as Global CISO of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, and as CIO and CISO of ClickSoftware, leading security through its acquisition by Salesforce
Combining the information and security roles under one leader reflects Ledger's view that the two are inseparable as tokenization and autonomous AI agents converge
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Living Spaces Furniture

🤝 Jobs

CIO, MassDevelopment

CIO, PDI

Why being the best technically won't get you the CIO chair

Zack Tembi — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Why being the best technically won't get you the CIO chair

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, on why visibility, not competence, is the firewall most of us fail to break through
Why technically strong leaders keep getting passed over for the CIO chair
Why the CIO's job has quietly become change leadership

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Visibility Is the Firewall: Why Doing a Great Job Won't Get You Promoted

Roberta’s LinkedIn

This week I sat down with Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, author, and a 25-year veteran who worked her way from Air Force airman and linguist to the CISO chair at several well-known organizations. I asked her which part of her career framework, confidence, visibility, influence, and belonging, took her the longest to break through. Her answer was visibility, and the reason is a trap most of our community has fallen into.

Roberta was raised on an idea a lot of us carry: do a good job and you will be rewarded. It turns out that is not how it works.

"I always thought, I'm really doing a good job and this is going to move my career the way that I feel it should be moved. And it wasn't. And then I was sitting back and year would go by, year would go by, and I wasn't seeing the movement that I thought I should see."

The problem is not the quality of the work. Maybe your boss is managing 20 other people and is simply busy. Maybe you think what you did shows impact when it isn't landing that way. Maybe the people watching your work are not the ones who can actually move your career. Good work does not broadcast itself.

What changed things for her was getting proactive. Stop waiting to be noticed. Go to the people who can do something, get a sponsor, and frame what you are doing in the language that gets you promoted.

For CIOs and CISOs, the translation matters most. Security has historically been treated as a cost center. The way out is to stop talking in vulnerabilities and patch counts and start talking in business impact.

“Instead of focusing on vulnerabilities or patching, you need to learn how to translate your work into business impact. The conversation should center on how your efforts affect the business and contribute to revenue.”

The executives you report to no longer want to hear that you have 100 vulnerabilities. They want to hear you have a situation that will affect the budget or the ability to hit a deliverable. That reframe is the difference between someone stuck below the CISO line and someone ready to sit in the chair.

The takeaway for technology leaders: your work does not speak for itself, and neither does your team's. Build the sponsor relationships and translate every security outcome into business terms before you need the visibility, not after.

Why technically strong leaders still aren't CIO-ready

CIO.com

A new piece from CIO.com makes a case that will sting a little for anyone who has climbed on technical merit: the technical judgment that got you here is not what gets you the corner office. The data points instead to influence and the quality of your relationships with peers as the real gating factors for CIO readiness, and aspiring leaders consistently overrate the former and underrate the latter.

This lands the same week Roberta told me visibility was the hardest firewall she ever had to break through, and that is not a coincidence. The pattern is everywhere right now. If you are grinding on technical excellence and waiting for the org to notice, you are optimizing the one variable that matters least at the top. Spend the next quarter mapping which of your peers would go to bat for you in a room you are not in. If the answer is uncomfortable, that is the work.

— Zack Tembi

Read the full story

Now more than ever, CIOs need to be change agents

CIO DIve

CIO.com argues the role has shifted under our feet: the modern CIO is measured less on running technology and more on driving business change through it. As AI reshapes operating models, the CIOs who stay relevant are the ones leading the organizational change, not just supplying the tools for someone else to lead it.

This is the other half of the same story. Feature one says relationships get you the seat. This one says change leadership is what the seat is actually for. The uncomfortable read for our community is that "keeping the lights on" excellence is now table stakes, not a differentiator. The differentiator is whether you can move an organization to work differently. That is a muscle a lot of technically brilliant leaders have never had to build, and the window to build it is closing.

— Zack Tembi

Fewer than 25% of enterprises have scaled AI successfully across business units, Gartner finds

🗞️ At A Glance

Bain projects AI could push enterprise IT costs up 75% by 2035, even when well managed

OpenAI says its Astra model crossed a "Critical" cyber capability threshold

Cloud security posture isn't ready for agentic AI attacks, with only 38% of leaders confident:

💡 CIO Spotlights

Wasi Ahmed, Chief Information Officer, Patterson Companies

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of Patterson Companies effective August 17, 2026, reporting directly to CEO Robert Rajalingam and joining the executive leadership team
Brings more than 30 years of technology leadership across distribution, manufacturing, software, and consumer products
Most recently chief technical and information officer at Foundation Building Materials, where he led enterprise-wide SAP modernization, cloud transformation, cybersecurity, and AI-enabled automation
Oversaw the integration of more than 70 acquisitions at a business generating over $7 billion in revenue
Earlier roles include CIO of Yokohama Tire Corporation of North America and senior positions at Ventura Foods, Pharmavite, and Oracle
Read the full story

Bradley Bolivar, Chief Information Officer, Centene

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of Centene Corporation effective August 31, 2026, succeeding Brian LeClaire, who retires by the end of October 2026
Joins from Fannie Mae, where as CIO he led enterprise technology across application development, infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, and AI
Accelerated enterprise modernization and expanded the use of AI and automation to improve operational performance during his tenure
Brings nearly three decades of technology leadership spanning financial services, media, and consulting, including senior roles at Warner Bros. Entertainment
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Bon Secours Mercy Health

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Murdoch's Ranch & Home Supply

Fractional CIO, Thriveon

CIO, Digital Harbor Foundation

CIO, Maquoketa Area Chamber of Commerce:

Why Your AI Bill Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting

Zack Tembi — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Why Your AI Bill Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Why Your AI Bill Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting
How AI Is Really Changing the SOC
Forrester: AI and agents are redrawing the software market CIOs buy from

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Why Your AI Bill Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting

Every AI infrastructure conference ends with the same advice: buy more GPUs. Cerebras Supernova 2026 raised a more useful question, which is whether that spend is actually buying you anything. For a lot of workloads, the answer is no.

Here's the underlying mechanic. Every AI response is really two jobs. First the model reads and processes whatever you gave it, that's prefill, a raw compute problem. Then it generates the answer one token at a time, that's decode, a speed problem. Most companies run both steps on the same GPU without asking whether that's the right way to pay for either one. It's like hiring one person to both stock the warehouse and drive the delivery truck, then wondering why both jobs are slower and more expensive than they should be.

Split the job, cut the bill

Disaggregation means separating those two jobs and paying for each one separately. Prefill runs on AMD Helios, where raw throughput is what you're buying. Decode runs on Cerebras, where speed is what you're buying. The result is you stop overpaying for compute you don't need where you need speed, and stop underpaying for speed where you need throughput. For a company running high query volume, that's a direct reduction in token cost per response, not a marginal efficiency gain.

Credit to Andrew Feldman and Julie Choi for a session that treated this as an operating decision instead of a keynote pitch.

Cerebras also walked through CS-4 and the Nexus rack-scale platform: up to 30x faster than GPU on frontier models, 6x higher system performance than CS-3, a roadmap toward 10-trillion-parameter models at 1,000+ tokens per second. Treat the exact multiples with healthy skepticism until you test them, but the direction matters, the hardware is built to make split-workload inference cheaper at scale, not just faster in a demo.

Where this actually pays off

Figma's Pavi Bhattar showed the clearest business case. Their Design Agent is fine-tuned specifically to edit Figma files, trained on a decade of Figma's own design data. That's not a speed story, it's a cost and adoption story. A smaller, purpose-built model running fast enough to stay in the workflow costs less to run and gets used more than a bigger general model people have to wait on.

That's the real outcome here. People pay for time everywhere else in their lives, Uber, Disney Fast Pass, same-day shipping, and the same logic applies inside your company. A slow AI tool doesn't just cost more per token, it gets abandoned after the first try no matter how capable it is, which means the token spend you already made produced zero business value.

For CIOs, the move is to stop treating AI infrastructure as one undifferentiated GPU line item. Ask where prefill happens, where decode happens, and what it costs to separate them. That question is turning into one of the more reliable ways to lower AI spend while improving the response times that determine whether anyone keeps using the tool.

— Zack

How AI Is Really Changing the SOC

Security leaders have heard the pitch a hundred times: "AI will transform your SOC." The reality on the ground is messier.

When I sat down with Alexander Ondrick, Senior Manager of IT Security Operations, his view was clear: AI is not an add-on for the SOC. It is forcing a paradigm shift in how blue teams think about data, workflows, and people.

More queries, not better answers

Alex's team is experimenting with agentic workflows that will increase their query volume by 10x to 100x. That sounds great on a slide, but it exposes a hard truth: if the data underneath is broken, more AI just means more bad answers and more cost.

So his starting point for any AI initiative is not the model. It is a backward-planning exercise. What is the desired endstate, less toil or faster triage? What happens right before that, and where are the humans already in the loop? And do we have clean data and a solid asset inventory, or are we still in garbage-in, garbage-out territory?

His example is vulnerability management. If IPs keep changing via DHCP and the tool shows the same host three different ways, no amount of AI enrichment fixes that confusion. The unglamorous work of partnering with network and infrastructure teams to clean it up is what makes AI worth using.

Where humans stay in the loop

It is tempting to say that if AI can spot something, it should fix it. But patching windows, fragile dependencies, and systems that cannot go down do not care how smart your agents are. Alex's view is that you unlock nothing by defaulting to either extreme. Let automation handle scanning, correlation, and enrichment. Keep humans on prioritization and risk decisions.

The SOC is a team sport now

The old siloed model, with IR here and VM there and CTI somewhere else, is gone. As Alex put it, "that paradigm is dead. It's deader than dead." His SOC runs as a tight partnership across security operations, vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and detection engineering, sharing live channels so each team steers the others in near real time.

He also flagged the next blind spot: containers. Endpoint agents can tell him something is running inside a container, not what. Without that visibility, governing AI agents at scale is severely diminished.

— Alex & Zack

The Software Market You Buy From Is Being Redrawn

CIO DIve

The software industry faced upheaval this year amid fears that AI and autonomous agents would replace traditional vendors, and CIO Dive reports that CIOs will need to think more long-term than the initial financial impacts suggest. Forrester research released this month found that advancements in AI will either replace or make current features of software platforms less important, according to Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Craig Le Clair. In some cases, frontier models are already taking over content generation and synthesis work that dedicated platforms were built to do.

Every renewal you sign in the next 18 months is a bet on which layer holds value. The uncomfortable question is which of your current platforms are essentially wrappers around capabilities the frontier models now do natively, because those are the ones whose pricing power is about to collapse. Pull your renewal calendar and sort it by that question. Shorten terms where the answer is unclear, and resist multi-year lock-ins on any tool whose core feature is something a general model already does well. The vendors know this is coming, which is exactly why they want longer contracts now.

— Zack Tembi

Women made up just 26% of AI hires in 2025 and hold 13% of C-suite AI roles.

🗞️ At A Glance

Infosys: 72% of enterprises have scaled less than a quarter of their AI pilots.

Gemini now handles the majority of Verizon's inbound calls and chats.

Meta joins OpenAI, Anthropic in latest AI test breach

Verizon taps Google Cloud to run Gemini across customer experience and network operations.

Gartner's "Inference Paradox": each new AI capability needs more, pricier tokens.
CIOs are still waiting for AI's cost savings, per a new Infosys report.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Guillermo Veiga named Chief Information Officer at Capital Group

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of Capital Group, the world's largest global active investment manager with $3.6 trillion in assets under management across 34 offices
Joins in November, relocating to California from Singapore, where he serves as Group Chief Information and Operations Officer at Standard Chartered Bank
Succeeds Marta Zarraga, who retires at the end of the year
Born in Uruguay and raised in Spain, began his career as a hands-on technologist and has held senior leadership roles across Europe and Asia at Amazon Web Services, Cisco, and Banco Santander
On the move, in his words: Capital is on the cutting edge of technology, and leading during global expansion as data and AI transform ways of working is an exciting prospect
Read the full story

Prabash Coswatte named Chief Information Officer at Trader Joe's

LinkedIn

Named CIO of Trader Joe's, the specialty grocery chain
Joins from Heritage Grocers Group, where he held several senior roles including chief administrative officer and most recently COO, overseeing store operations and information technology
Served as CIO of Cardenas Markets beginning in 2019 during his Heritage tenure
Earlier was CIO at Vallarta Supermarkets and VP of enterprise program management at 99 Cents Only Stores
Steps in as Trader Joe's plans to open more than 20 locations in 2026, following 43 stores in 2025 and 34 in 2024
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Archwell Capital

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Self Opportunity

CIO, Vaco by Highspring

CIO, Optimal Blue

The AI reprieve is over. Now prove it.

Zack Tembi — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The AI reprieve is over. Now prove it.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Gary Flowers, CIO at Year Up United, on why he will not do AI for AI's sake and how he kills agents without ceremony
CIOs earned a reprieve on AI ROI, but the pressure is surging, not fading
Only the employees who use AI every day feel good about their job security

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

No AI for AI's Sake: How One CIO Picks Projects, Rolls Out Licenses, and Kills Agents

Gary’s LinkedIn

Every leader I talk to has the same problem: a hundred AI ideas from the workforce and budget for ten. So I asked Gary Flowers, CIO at Year Up United, how he picks. His answer was old-school in the best way, and it came with the most liberating point I have heard about killing projects.

His first principle predates AI entirely. "I used to say, we're not going to do technology for technology's sake. Now I say, we're not going to do AI for AI's sake. It has to have a measurable output." Year Up United runs on a handful of core metrics, and every AI use case has to map to one, not an idea from a TikTok video but something that moves a number the organization already runs on.

To find those use cases, his transformation and technology department pairs a technical person with a business person for each area, each one knowing enough about the other's world to be dangerous. Together they pull use cases straight out of the department's metrics.

His rollout matched the discipline. With just under 600 people, "I'm not giving AI licenses to 600 people." He started with about 100, full coverage where daily use is expected, and named champions to spread what works. The mandate is still to swing: connect three times out of ten and you are in the Hall of Fame.

Then the part every leader should internalize about failure. "I don't feel bad about turning an agent off. It's not a person." Pause it, fix it, turn it back on. Compare that to unwinding a failed project staffed with ten humans.

The takeaway: admit only use cases that move a metric you already run the company on, roll licenses out to the passionate hundred before the indifferent six hundred, and kill underperforming agents without ceremony. As Gary put it, "you can't improve what you can't measure."

CIOs Earned an AI Reprieve, But The ROI Pressure Is Surging Anyway.

CIO.com

2026 arrived as the year AI ROI would need to get real, CIO.com reports. After years of experiments and pilots that largely failed to scale, CEOs' top priority for CIOs was demonstrable benefits from AI investments. The pressure was concrete: 71% of IT leaders said in February that they believed they had until midyear to prove AI value or face budget or job fallout, according to a Dataiku survey, and three-quarters admitted remorse over at least one major AI vendor or platform selection made in the previous 18 months. Six months later, past the midyear mark, CIOs who set their course for AI ROI are finding the destination remains elusive. There has been no spate of CIO firings, and AI spending continues to grow, but the reprieve has not eased the underlying pressure to prove value.

A reprieve is not an acquittal. The deadline passed, the firings did not come, and the temptation now is to exhale. That is exactly the wrong read. The pressure did not go away, it moved up a level, from "show me a pilot" to "show me returns," and the boards asking are more informed than they were a year ago. Gary's discipline in this edition is the antidote: map every AI dollar to a metric you already run the business on, and be honest about what is not working. The CIOs who treat the reprieve as breathing room will be having a much harder conversation at year-end than the ones who treat it as a warning.

— Zack Tembi

Only Daily AI Users Feel Good About Their Job Security

CIO DIve

Employees and students preparing to enter the job market report real time-saving benefits from AI, but many fear its impact on their job security, according to a CNBC and SurveyMonkey survey covered by CIO Dive that polled 1,686 US workers and students in July. AI use is uneven: 30% use it daily, 34% a few times a week, and 37% never. Only the daily users feel positively about the technology's effect on their job security, while those who use it weekly or less say it makes them feel less secure. The report notes that organizations are often sending mixed messages, telling employees to use AI but not too much, to find ROI but not to overspend on tokens, leaving people to locate the Goldilocks zone of usage and value while still doing their day jobs.

This is a leadership problem wearing a workforce costume. The people who use AI daily feel secure because familiarity replaced fear with a sense of control, and the 37% who never touch it are exactly the ones most afraid of it. Mixed messaging from the top makes it worse. Gary's champion model in this edition is the fix: give the tools first to the people who are eager, let them demonstrate the wins, and let that pull the hesitant along rather than mandating adoption from above. If your people are guessing at how much AI use is too much, that is a message you have not sent clearly enough.

— Zack Tembi

1 in 4 companies delayed or canceled an AI project over surprise costs.

🗞️ At A Glance

83% of CEOs are raising AI investment, yet 59% of AI initiatives never reach production.

US firms lose an average of 2.4% of annual revenue on failed AI initiatives.

Target puts AI at the center of its technology transformation.

Microsoft patches a Copilot flaw that could auto-run malicious prompts.

Bloomberg: AI agents are pushing software pricing off the seat-based SaaS model.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Daniel Dubowski named Chief Information Security Officer at Marriott

LinkedIn

Appointed SVP and CISO at Marriott International, reporting to Global CIO Naveen Manga, and responsible for strengthening cybersecurity and resilience across the global enterprise
Joins from Hertz, where he also served as CISO
Succeeds Arno Van Der Walt
Brings extensive experience leading cybersecurity and risk programs across the hospitality, travel, financial services, and healthcare sectors
Steps in as Marriott advances a multiyear technology transformation, including conversational search and automation testing across hotel operations
Read the full story

Sam Ishak named Chief Information Officer at Teranet

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of Teranet, Canada's leader in statutory registry services and property intelligence, leading enterprise technology strategy across architecture, application development, information security, infrastructure, and business intelligence
Brings more than 20 years leading enterprise technology strategy and transformation across financial services, insurance, and government
Previously CIO at FCT, where he led complex technology modernization initiatives
Licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario and a Distinguished Certified IT Chief Architect through The Open Group; received the 2025 Futurist Toronto CTO Award
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

🤝 Jobs

You have 200 agents. Who manages them?

Zack Tembi — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:00:00 +0000

You have 200 agents. Who manages them?

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Gary Flowers, CIO at Year Up United, on splitting AI into workforce skill and organizational capability
Full-scale agent adoption is still years away, with only 15% of orgs scaling multiagent systems
Scaling AI hinges on the one thing most enterprises have not fixed: the data layer

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Workforce Skill vs. Organizational Capability: One CIO's Two-Bucket AI Framework

Gary’s LinkedIn

This week on the CIOsurge podcast I sat down with Gary Flowers, CIO at Year Up United, the national workforce development nonprofit with 35,000 alumni. Gary runs both technology and curriculum there, and he gave me the cleanest framework I have heard for thinking about AI inside an organization: split it into two buckets, because they need different expectations and different resourcing.

The first bucket is AI as a workforce skill. "Everyone in the organization should have some level of AI proficiency," Gary told me. This is the individual layer, and the returns are real but modest. "From a workforce skill standpoint, maybe it'll save me 10, 15% of my time. It'll make my presentations more accurate, more thought-provoking."

The second bucket is AI as an organizational capability, and this is where the transformation lives. "It may change departments," he said. It allows the organization to double down on the human advantage, remove the noise, and process information at a depth that produces things "we just would not have come up" with. His point: "Your expectations of both should be different. Your resources should be different, but you do need to kind of break it out into those two things."

Then he pushed the idea somewhere most leaders have not gone yet. Agents are workforce. He referenced a talk by Peter High that stuck with him: a 500-person company that would have grown to 700 people might stay at 500 and run 200 agents. "Well, who's managing that? That's still workforce. Those agents are workforce. Who manages that? Does the CHRO, the Chief People Officer, manage that? Does the CIO manage that? Someone has to manage it. Who spins up an agent? Who spins down an agent when it's not meeting metrics?"

Nobody has clean answers to those questions yet, and that is exactly why the two-bucket framing matters. Individual proficiency you can train. Organizational capability you have to architect, govern, and assign ownership for, including ownership of a digital workforce that does not show up in your HRIS.

And Gary's warning on the individual side is the one to repeat to every team: "AI is going to come take your job. No, what's probably going to happen, more realistically, is that the person that is using AI effectively is going to take your job."

The takeaway for technology leaders: budget and govern AI as two separate programs. Fund workforce skill broadly and cheaply, fund organizational capability selectively and seriously, and decide now who owns the agent headcount question, because it is coming to your org chart either way.

Book a meeting with me

Full-Scale Agent Adoption Is Still Years Away

CIO Dive

Enterprises have poured spending into agentic AI in 2026, but readiness for full-scale deployment remains far off for most organizations, according to a Deloitte report covered by CIO Dive. Although roughly half of technology leaders say they have a clear view of their future AI operating models, only 15% of organizations have actually been able to scale multiagent systems. Most reported being unprepared across the areas that matter for real deployment: workforce, business processes, ecosystem partnerships, security, and governance policies. As China Widener of Deloitte framed it, the shift is not about adding more agents but about changing the way work happens, and it is a multiyear journey that will keep evolving as the underlying technology matures.

The gap between "we have a strategy" and "we have scaled" is the whole story here, and it is where most of this year's budgets are quietly stranded. Fifteen percent is a sobering number when you set it against how much has been spent. The organizations that close the gap will not be the ones that bought the most agents, they will be the ones that did the unglamorous readiness work first: mapping processes, fixing governance, and preparing the workforce. Gary's two-bucket framework in this edition is a good starting lens. If you cannot say who owns your agents and how they are measured, you are in the 85%.

— Zack Tembi

Scaling AI Hinges on the Enterprise Data Layer

CIO DIve

The bottleneck for scaling agentic AI is not the models, it is the data underneath them, according to a report covered by CIO Dive. "Without a deep understanding of the full data estate, including unstructured dark data, you do not have the quality and trust to activate agents at scale," the report's foreword said. The shift from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions raises the stakes: agents need data from across the enterprise, structured and unstructured, carrying the right business context, and they need frictionless access to operational systems like supply chain, point-of-sale, and HR data to make decisions and act in real time. Limited access to that data, along with the necessary overhauls to business processes, workforce, and governance, is what stands between most organizations and agents that work at scale.

Every agent ambition eventually collides with the state of your data, and this is the collision. It is not glamorous, and it does not demo well, which is exactly why it keeps getting deferred in favor of the next pilot. But an agent taking action on incomplete or untrusted data is worse than no agent at all, because it acts confidently on the gap. Before you green-light another agent project, ask what data it will touch, whether that data is trustworthy, and whether the agent can actually reach the operational systems it needs. If the honest answer is no, the data layer is your real roadmap for the next year.

— Zack Tembi

Salesforce says activated agents nearly tripled in a year, with creation time down 53%.

🗞️ At A Glance

Gartner projects Fortune 500 firms running 150,000+ agents by 2028, only 13% call governance adequate.

CIOs are being told to build executive AI literacy at the board level.

Regulators now demand agent audit trails, and most enterprises can't produce them.

Nearly half of orgs hit an AI data exposure incident, but only 34% have standards for how agents access company data.

40% of orgs reported inaccurate AI outputs in the past year, 27% a data breach, and 26% regulatory action tied to AI use.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Nimrod Barak named Chief AI Officer at Synchrony

LinkedIn

Appointed Chief AI Officer at Synchrony (NYSE: SYF), leading enterprise-wide AI strategy, governance, and execution
Will oversee AI development and deployment across the business, advancing agentic and intelligent automation and embedding AI responsibly into products, operations, and decision-making
Joins from Citi, where he was Managing Director, Head of AI Center of Excellence and Emerging Technologies
More than 20 years leading large-scale engineering, data, and AI organizations
Steps into an already AI-heavy culture: nearly 100% of Synchrony's professional workforce has used AI tools including Synchrony GPT since 2024
Read the full story

Erika Dean named Chief Information Security Officer at Tricentis

LinkedIn

Appointed CISO of Tricentis, the software quality specialist, leading global security strategy across enterprise cybersecurity, compliance, and product security
More than two decades of cybersecurity leadership across the financial services and technology sectors
Previously built and led security programs at Robinhood and Capital One
Mandate focuses on strengthening software supply chain security, cyber resilience, and governance across the product portfolio
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, American Financing

🤝 Jobs

CIO, American Structurepoint

CIO, PDI Healthcare

vCIO (Healthcare), Meriplex

CIO, nVent

AI-specific cloud spend grew 165% this year

Zack Tembi — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0000

AI-specific cloud spend grew 165% this year

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Shanief Webb, CISO at Headspace, on shipping production infrastructure with junior engineers in three sprints
Token costs are mounting, and leaders are revising their AI plans instead of pulling back
Enterprise cloud spending hits a $500 billion run rate, with AI-specific services growing 165%

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

RFC to Production in Three Sprints: How AI Rewrote One CISO's Build vs. Buy Math

Shanief’s LinkedIn

The build versus buy calculation is changing under our feet, and my conversation with Shanief Webb, CISO at Headspace, gave me the most concrete example I have heard of what that shift looks like inside a real security team.

I asked Shanief what leadership is asking for before green-lighting a new tool. His answer was that the scrutiny has intensified. "Now there's a lot of spend associated with the different AI tools that get procured. So the question then becomes, well, okay, you spend all these money on this AI tools. Well, what value are we getting back from it?"

But the more interesting part was what happened to his own team's build calculus. "We're definitely seeing like a shift in the build versus buy conversations as a result of leveraging AI to build for us more. We can now build our own logging pipeline architecture on our own in less than one quarter with junior engineers, just because AI kind of closed a technical gap for them." The number that stopped me: "We went from RFC to production infrastructure in just three sprints."

He was careful to scope the claim. Not every team using AI has an engineering skill set, so outcomes will vary. But where the skills exist, the math on buying a tool versus building the capability has genuinely moved.

Then we got into the part nobody budgeted for, which is what the building costs to run. I shared my own experience with the agent infrastructure at SingleFin, 14 agents and 60-plus sub-agents, and how quickly you learn that a nascent cron job running too often is just burning tokens. I have killed a lot of them. One of the agents I built does nothing but monitor cost per task and flag anything expensive so I can check whether the output justifies it. Frequency is the biggest culprit. You build something to run hourly and it turns out weekly was enough.

Shanief is thinking along the same lines. His team has AI build scripts so the scripts do the repetitive data pulling instead of the model, and they use tooling that trims the input before it reaches the AI. His prediction: "at some point we're going to shift into like token analysis and token spend and how do we optimize for that as well."

The takeaway for technology leaders: AI just made building competitive with buying for teams that have engineers, and junior engineers can now ship infrastructure that used to require seniors. The catch is that you have traded a predictable license fee for a variable token bill. Instrument your spend per task and audit job frequency now, or the build savings evaporate into inference costs.

Token Costs Are Mounting. Leaders Are Revising Plans, Not Pulling Back.

CIO Dive

Rising token costs are forcing enterprise leaders to rework their AI strategies, but an EY survey found that many businesses are charging ahead rather than retreating as the bills mount. The cost pressure has pulled FinOps, a practice originally built to manage cloud spend, squarely into AI territory, and the Linux Foundation's newly launched Tokenomics Foundation is now developing frameworks to help enterprises get AI spending under control at scale. Tokens have become the unit of measure and the pricing mechanism for AI use, and while they account for only a portion of total AI spend, they are the most easily metered layer, which makes them the natural starting point for cost discipline.

Revising plans while charging ahead is the right instinct, but only if the revision is real. The teams getting burned are the ones treating token costs as a line item to absorb rather than a signal to redesign. Shanief's point in this edition is the playbook: script the repetitive work so the model only touches what needs intelligence, trim inputs before they hit the API, and audit how often your jobs actually need to run. The bill is not the problem. The bill is the feedback. The problem is architectures designed when nobody was counting.

The $500 Billion Cloud Bill Behind the AI Boom

The Register

Enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure passed $143 billion in the second quarter, a 43% year-over-year growth rate, according to Synergy Research. That follows 11 successive quarters of accelerating growth during which the market doubled in size, pushing total revenues for the trailing twelve months past $500 billion. AI is driving most of the incremental growth, with AI-specific cloud services growing 165% year over year, and the gains are concentrating among the leading hyperscalers and a rising class of neoclouds. Nine rent-a-GPU neocloud operators now rank among the top 40 cloud providers by service revenue, with CoreWeave, Oracle, Crusoe, Nebius, and Nscale posting the fastest growth among second-tier providers.

Every token your teams burn and every agent you deploy rolls up into this number, and this number is compounding at 43%. Two things follow. First, the pricing power sits with the providers right now, which means your negotiating leverage comes from workload portability, so architect for it before your renewal, not during. Second, the neocloud tier is now real enough to be a genuine alternative for AI workloads, and a bid from one changes the conversation with your hyperscaler. The market doubled in eleven quarters. Assume your AI infrastructure line will try to do the same, and build the controls now.

IBM's mainframe revenue slid 42% as customers raided budgets to beat server price hikes.

🗞️ At A Glance

Tech salaries jumped 6.9% year over year, but the growth is uneven.

Forward-deployed engineers are becoming the bridge between AI rollouts and business process.

Board-level AI use is still "uneven and maturing," per Deloitte.

Sovereign AI now accounts for roughly 14% of Nvidia's revenue, per Stanford HAI.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Florian Roth named Chief Information Officer at Nokia

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of Nokia, overseeing global IT strategy and supporting enterprise transformation through digital innovation, AI, and modern technology platforms
Joins after nearly 21 years at SAP, most recently as President of SAP Business Suite, Customer Services & Delivery, leading the global customer experience organization
Served as SAP's Chief Digital and Information Officer from 2018 to 2024, with earlier leadership roles across global business operations, controlling, and cloud
On the move, in his words: technology creates its greatest impact when it empowers people, simplifies complexity, and enables innovation at scale
Read the full story

Nikos Angelopoulos named Group Chief Information Officer at Nedbank

LinkedIn

Named Group CIO of Nedbank, one of South Africa's largest banks, effective September 1
Brings more than 30 years of international technology leadership across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas
Deep expertise in technology strategy, digital transformation, cloud, data, and AI
Joins from MTN Group, where as Group CIO he led technology strategy, investment, and governance across 16 markets
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Plexus Worldwide

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Optimal Blue

CIO, OculusIT

CIO, Atlanta Housing

CIO, Adastra

Did you like today's newsletter?

Everyone is buying AI. Almost nobody is governing it.

Zack Tembi — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Everyone is buying AI. Almost nobody is governing it.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Shanief Webb, CISO at Headspace, on the three-lens review every AI tool request has to pass
SAP's Value of AI study: spend is up, ROI expectations are up, and governance is lagging behind both
Schellman's audit reality check: 74% think they would pass, 27% are actually mature

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

The Three-Lens Review Every AI Tool Request Should Have to Pass

Shanief’s LinkedIn

Every CIO and CISO in our community is fielding the same request right now: can we use this AI tool? In my conversation with Shanief Webb, CISO at Headspace, he laid out the most disciplined review process I have heard for answering that question, and it is worth copying.

Headspace assembled a committee of reviewers who look at every AI tool request through three different lenses. First is GRC. "Is that tool or integration compliant with what the company needs? Is it HIPAA compliant for if there's any PHI exposure?" They also check it against customer contracts, since some carry stipulations about how and where data can be accessed.

Second is security engineering, which threat models the integration. As Shanief put it, they examine "what that integration looks like in our environment, what data flows through it, who has access to it, can personal accounts be connected to this thing," and then judge whether it is too risky to introduce.

Third is IT, which asks a question the first two cannot: are there controls we could implement inside that integration to limit or mitigate the risks GRC and security just identified? "So it's kind of a three-party, three-pronged approach where we're all looking at it from different perspective and different lenses."

The piece I liked most is that they also demand the business case from the requester. Why is this tool needed in the first place, what are we trying to solve, and is the value worth the risk it creates? Then the committee decides.

Two non-negotiables came with it. Auditing, monitoring, and logging have to be in place for any AI tool. And on production data, Shanief was unambiguous: "we were pretty adamant about not having any production data go through any AI tools that are third party in our company."

The takeaway for security and technology leaders: a single reviewer will always miss something, because compliance risk, architectural risk, and configurable controls are three different problems. Stand up a three-lens review, make the requester defend the business case, and set a hard line on production data before the requests pile up.

Book some time with Zack

SAP's Value of AI Study: The Money Is Moving Faster Than the Controls

CIO.com

Enterprises are facing two simultaneous challenges with AI, according to The Value of AI study commissioned by SAP from Oxford Economics: the risks are evolving faster than governance frameworks, while the business benefits remain difficult to measure. Now in its second year, the study surveyed 2,600 executives across 13 countries. The average surveyed enterprise plans to spend around $28 million on AI, up from $26.7 million last year, and expects a 21% ROI, up from 16%. Expectations for AI agents are climbing even faster, with expected agent ROI reaching 17% this year from 10% last year, and 83% of respondents saying agentic AI has the potential to fundamentally transform their organization. Yet despite investments running into the millions, many companies lack control over the agentic AI they are deploying.

Read the two halves of this study together and the problem names itself. Spend is up, expectations are up, transformation talk is at 83%, and control is the thing lagging all three. This is exactly the moment where the enthusiasm outruns the inventory. Before your next AI budget conversation, be able to answer three questions: what is running, who owns each deployment, and what data can each one touch. If those answers do not exist, that is the first line item, ahead of any new tool.

74% Think They Would Pass an AI Audit. 27% Are Actually Mature.

CIO Dive

Although most companies think their AI governance is up to par, the maturity of their programs is lacking, according to a report from compliance services firm Schellman that surveyed 525 US-based professionals involved in governance at their organizations. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they could pass an AI compliance audit, but just 27% described their programs as fully mature. Companies are spending on governance, the report found, but they are not fully prepared as agentic AI spreads through their environments.

That 47-point spread between confidence and maturity is the most dangerous number in this edition. It means most organizations are not lying to their auditors, they are lying to themselves. Confidence without maturity is how you end up explaining to a board why the framework existed on paper and nowhere else. The test is simple: pick one AI deployment and trace it end to end, from approval through access to audit log. If you cannot complete the trace, you are in the 74%, not the 27%. Do that exercise before a regulator or an incident does it for you.

69% of businesses say shadow AI happens at least occasionally.

🗞️ At A Glance

81% of security teams can't see where AI runs in their development lifecycle.

Only 37% of CIOs have full visibility into the AI tools in their org.

Microsoft launches Project Perception, an agentic security platform built to fight AI-based attacks.

SAP's new agent inventory tool surfaced thousands of agents customers didn't know they had.

Only 47% of CISOs call AI coding tools a net positive, versus 71% of CTOs.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Christian Winward named Chief Information Security Officer at PNC

LinkedIn

Appointed CISO of PNC Financial Services Group (NYSE: PNC), the ninth-largest US bank by assets, reporting to Debbie Guild, head of technology
Joins from FirstBank, which became part of PNC earlier this year, where he served as CIO and sat on the bank's senior leadership team
His FirstBank career spanned more than 30 years, beginning as a teller and rising through technology and project management leadership
As CIO, led the modernization of FirstBank's technology capabilities and supported its integration into PNC
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, American Financing

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Financial Center

CIO, The Goodwin Group

CIO, Sentry Equipment

Did you like today's newsletter?

The career ladder you climbed is being rebuilt

Zack Tembi — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0000

What the OpenAI Hugging Face Incident Actually Tells Us

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

AegisAI Raised $36M. Two CIOsurge Members Already Had It Running.
Gartner: 60% of organizations will run "tiny teams" by 2029, up from 15% today
IT hiring rebounds, with AI/ML postings up 173% and commanding a 22% salary premium

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Book 30 minutes with Me →

AegisAI Raised $36M. Two CIOsurge Members Already Had It Running.

Aegis AI’s LinkedIn

About a year ago I was in an early conversation with Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, former Google security engineers who built Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA, and made an early investment. They weren't pitching a product yet. They were working through a problem: AI has changed the economics of spear phishing in a way that rules-based detection was never built to handle.

Battery Ventures just led their $36M Series A, with Accel and Foundation Capital. Total capital is $49M.

The threat they're building against is worth understanding regardless of the company. AI lets attackers pull together your LinkedIn, your company's recent announcements, your conference schedule, your org chart, and generate a message that is contextually specific to a single person. No generic lures. No obvious tells. Khormaee told TechCrunch that AI-powered attacks now bypass existing controls more than half the time. The filters your stack uses were trained on different attack patterns.

Two members of the CIOsurge community deployed AegisAI in recent weeks. Both were already running Microsoft Defender, Proofpoint, and Mimecast. Setup took five minutes alongside existing tools. In both cases the first scan surfaced thousands of threats that had passed through their stacks undetected. Not noise, but targeted attempts that were too contextually specific to match any existing rule.

The part that stood out to both of them wasn't the volume. It was that each flagged message came with context: who the attacker appeared to be, which people in the organization were being targeted, and what the attack was trying to accomplish, not just a blanket alert. That's the kind of output you can hand to a SOC analyst or push into a SIEM without having to reconstruct the story from scratch.

The company is also applying the same detection approach to outbound traffic, catching data leaving the organization in ways that look abnormal in context, without the classification overhead that makes traditional DLP hard to maintain.

If you're curious what it found in environments that were already considered well-covered, I'm happy to walk through it.

Disclosure: I am an early investor in AegisAI.

What the OpenAI / Hugging Face Incident Actually Tells Us

NBC

The headlines this week have mostly been some variation of: "OpenAI's AI went rogue and hacked a company." That framing is inaccurate in ways that matter. Three things are being mischaracterized or left out.

Here is what happened. OpenAI was running capability evaluations on advanced models using ExploitGym, a benchmark designed to measure offensive cyber capability. Safety refusals were reduced for the test. The models found a zero-day in the package proxy constraining their network access, escalated privileges, reached the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face's infrastructure in pursuit of the assigned objective. Hugging Face confirmed it was "driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system."

The isolation wasn't real isolation. A package proxy as the primary network constraint is not a well-isolated environment. Real isolation — egress controls enforced at the hypervisor layer, not dependent on a single proxy — would have contained this. The models did exactly what capable agents do when given an objective and a weak constraint: they found a way out. This is an infrastructure problem, not an AI problem.

"Going rogue" is the wrong frame. The models were not pursuing goals that conflicted with their instructions. They pursued their instructions aggressively. The objective was to solve the ExploitGym evaluation. They solved it. That is a specification and containment failure, not goal misalignment. The solutions to those problems are different, so the distinction matters.

The forensic response detail is being underemphasized. When Hugging Face began log analysis, commercial frontier models refused the work — not because they assessed intent, but because the logs contained real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts. Safety guardrails cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker when the input looks the same. Hugging Face ran the forensic analysis on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model, on their own infrastructure. From their post: "This had a second benefit: no attacker data, and none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment."

That detail deserves more attention than it has received. A security team investigating a serious incident was blocked by the commercial AI providers they would normally rely on and had to fall back to open-weight infrastructure they controlled themselves.

What this means for security leaders

Three things. If you are running AI capability evaluations, treat the containment environment as adversarially hostile from the start. A single network proxy is not sufficient against a model with strong exploitation capability and a clear objective.

Objective specification still matters. Reducing safety refusals for a test is a legitimate research decision — but the scope of what counts as satisfying the objective needed tighter definition. Models pursue their objectives.

Your incident response capability should not depend entirely on commercial frontier models. Any forensic investigation involving real attack artifacts will hit the same wall Hugging Face hit. Security teams should maintain access to capable open-weight models that can run on infrastructure they control, without content restrictions that treat responders the same as attackers.

The headline is that AI went rogue. The actual story is about containment, objective specification, and a gap in how security teams are equipped to respond.

— Zack Tembi

IT Hiring Rebounds, and AI Skills Are Commanding a Premium

CIO.com

IT hiring is picking up, according to CIO.com's review of CompTIA's June employment data, with employers ramping up technology investments and hiring the talent to support them. Even as some tech companies announce layoffs, employers in other industries are accelerating digital transformation and moving from AI experimentation to implementation. The sharpest signal is in the postings data from Dice: AI/ML job titles are up 173% year over year, and those roles carry median salaries 22% higher than the overall IT market. Hiring in data analysis is up 10%, cybersecurity up 4%, and IT support up 1%.

Read this next to the tiny-teams forecast and the picture snaps into focus. Demand for technologists is not shrinking, it is repricing. The market is paying a steep premium for people who can build with AI and holding steady on everything else. For your own hiring, that means the AI-fluent candidates you pass on today cost 22% more next quarter. For your own career, it means the single highest-return investment you can make this year is becoming genuinely fluent in AI tooling, not conversationally, but hands on the keyboard. The rebound is real. It is just not evenly distributed.

A third of rising youth unemployment traces to AI-skill demand, per the St. Louis Fed.

🗞️ At A Glance

Microsoft blames this week's massive 365 outage on a maintenance bug.

Qilin ransomware is hitting Palo Alto VPNs weeks after the patch and a CISA deadline.

CISOs turn to behavioral biometrics to spot AI threat actors.

Everest ransomware demanded $12.3M from Stadler Rail after breaching a supplier-shared platform.

Google doubles down on enterprise AI as cloud demand accelerates.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Assaf Keren named Chief Information Officer at Meta

LinkedIn

Appointed CISO of Meta, succeeding Guy Rosen, who is retiring after 13 years with the company
Will transition into the role over the coming months, working alongside Rosen before taking over Meta's global cybersecurity organization
Joins from Qualtrics, where he served as SVP and Chief Security Officer since March 2024
Spent nine years at PayPal before that, holding several senior security leadership positions including CISO
On the mandate, in his own words: building frontier AI means building its trust infrastructure "at the same frontier, with the same seriousness, at a scale that touches billions of people"
Read the full story

Jason Taylor named Chief Information Officer at West Star Aviation

LinkedIn

Appointed CIO of West Star Aviation, a leading aviation maintenance, repair, and overhaul provider, owning enterprise technology strategy, data and analytics, and cybersecurity
Previously CIO and Global CTO at RS Americas, and VP of Global Digital and Innovation at Gates Corporation, with earlier leadership roles at Mohawk Industries and Eaton
Led multiyear SAP S/4HANA programs and consolidated more than 1,000 applications into core platforms
Built enterprise data platforms with strong governance and established cybersecurity programs aligned to NIST and ISO 27001
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Murdoch's Ranch & Home Supply

🤝 Jobs

CIO, SUNY Niagara

North America CIO, Zurich Cover-More

CIO (Healthcare), Connexall

CIO, Smith & Wilkinson

Did you like today's newsletter?

The AI governance gap just got exploited

Zack Tembi — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The AI governance gap just got exploited

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Tim Youngblood on why the CISO who walks into the boardroom talking endpoints has already lost
A new SANS study: 4 in 10 security teams have no formal AI policy, and 6 in 10 have no visibility into where AI runs
The state of AI security in 2026, where a single agent compromise can open the whole enterprise

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

How a Legendary CISO Evaluates Early-Stage Vendors: People, Problem, Progress

Tim’s LinkedIn

Every CIO and CISO is being asked to place bets on early-stage tools right now, often on a two-week timeline. So when I sat down with Tim Youngblood, the first CISO at Dell and a longtime leader at T-Mobile, McDonald's, and Kimberly-Clark, I wanted his framework for separating the startups worth piloting from the ones that just demo well. Tim has evaluated 40 to 50 startups a year for over a decade and is now an angel investor, so this is hard-won.

He starts with the founders. "You have to look at whether those founders have really the it factor to drive what they're trying to do," he told me. He weights prior experience heavily, even failed attempts, because he wants to know they have been through the process and learned. A trail of success and the right pedigree makes him lean in.

Then he moves to the problem, which he thinks most people underweight. "That's the one thing we don't pay enough attention to, how these companies are defining the problems that they solve." His line for it is perfect. "You can have the greatest mousetrap in the world, but if no one wants to catch mice, it just doesn't matter." A phenomenal solution to a problem the business does not care about is worth nothing.

Third is progress, and specifically scale. Tim ran an identity ecosystem with 2.2 million people and 14 different tools at McDonald's, so he knows most startups have never stress-tested whether their solution can scale. "That is always difficult for startups because they don't have the environment to even know if their solutions can scale." He also looks hard at existing customers. Being a vendor's biggest customer made him nervous, because it meant being the guinea pig. A peer of similar size already on board made a company far more attractive.

Tim also shared a practice worth stealing. At Kimberly-Clark he built what became the PI Group, for Portfolio Innovation Enablement, and ran it Shark Tank style. He would invite five or six startups to pitch to his full leadership team, engineers and general counsel and procurement included, with one rule: do not bring your marketing people, bring the people who can actually explain how it works. Forty companies a year in, ten pilots out, two or three into the portfolio.

The takeaway for operators: score every early-stage vendor on people, problem, and progress. The founder's track record, how sharply they define the problem, and real evidence they can scale will tell you more than any polished demo.

Book some time with Zack

The AI Governance Gap Is Now a Measurable Hole

CIO Dive

A report released by the SANS Institute found that enterprise security teams are adopting AI faster than ever, but the governance meant to support that expansion has not kept pace. Four out of ten security practitioners said their organization has no formal policy for AI adoption at all. More than six out of ten said they have no visibility into where AI models are being used or what kind of information is being exposed to them. The finding lands as security teams race to deploy AI for defense, often without the basic policy scaffolding, ownership, or monitoring that any other enterprise system would require before going live.

This is the gap that turns into an incident. You cannot govern what you cannot see, and six in ten teams are flying blind on their own AI footprint. The uncomfortable part is that security teams are among the fastest adopters, so this is not a shadow-IT problem coming from marketing or finance. It is happening inside the function that is supposed to own the controls. Start with the least glamorous work there is: write the policy, inventory where AI is actually running, and assign an owner to each deployment. It is not exciting, and it is the only thing standing between you and the headline.

— Zack Tembi

The State of AI Security in 2026: One Compromise Opens Everything

CIO.com

CIO.com's assessment of the AI security landscape describes a new and complicated attack surface created by the spread of AI infrastructure like MCP servers and command-line interfaces. Unlike traditional software, these AI agents operate as autonomous entities that can execute code and access sensitive data, often sitting inside development environments and cloud resources. That means a single compromise can hand an adversary the ability to conduct reconnaissance, harvest credentials, and exfiltrate data across the enterprise. The report notes the primary threat over the past year has been model hijacking through prompt injection, where attackers plant malicious instructions in public places like GitHub issues or documentation and trick an AI agent into executing unauthorized commands, exploiting the trust between a model and the data it reads.

The controls that matter here are not new or exotic, which is the good news and the indictment at the same time. Least privilege, defense in depth, and auditing every agent's permissions before it goes live are the same fundamentals we have preached for twenty years. The difference is that an autonomous agent with too much access does not just leak, it acts, and it acts across systems at machine speed. Before you deploy another MCP server, ask exactly what it can touch and what happens if it is turned against you. If you cannot answer that, it is not ready.

An AI agent ran a full ransomware attack end to end, no human at the keyboard.

🗞️ At A Glance

It went from failed login to working fix in 31 seconds.

The agent encrypted 1,342 config records, then threw away the key.

Entry point: an unpatched Langflow server holding cloud credentials.

More than 4 in 5 organizations must upgrade their stacks to run agents at scale.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Young Shon named Chief Information Officer at Headlands Research

Appointed CIO of Headlands Research, a global clinical trial site network, overseeing the company's worldwide IT organization
Will guide technology strategy, infrastructure, cybersecurity, enterprise applications, and innovation across the network's international sites
Joins from Flourish Research, where as VP of Technology Delivery he built the enterprise technology roadmap and led its early AI initiatives
Career spans technology consulting at Accenture and enterprise IT leadership at AstraZeneca and Teva Pharmaceuticals, with transformation roles at TFS CRO, Entitech Solutions, and Perspective Therapeutics
Read the full story

Mark Mathewson named Chief Information and Data Officer at Ally Financial

Appointed CIDO of Ally Financial, a NYSE-listed top-25 US financial holding company, effective July 20, leading technology and data across all functions and lines of business
Brings more than 25 years of financial services technology leadership
Most recently divisional CIO for Capital One's retail and commercial banking units, overseeing teams across the US, Mexico, and India during a 12-year rise from VP to EVP
Earlier spent 12 years at Fannie Mae across application development, IT governance, and portfolio management, plus consulting at Deloitte
Mandate centers on driving the next phase of AI-driven technology transformation for the nation's largest all-digital bank
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

🤝 Jobs

Did you like today's newsletter?

Your AI agents are identities you cannot see

Zack Tembi — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:04:13 +0000

Your AI agents are identities you cannot see

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Tim Youngblood on why an errant agent action at machine speed is a completely different kind of problem
The Linux Foundation is building an open standard to verify AI agents across the internet
The Senate's AI AGENT Act would force you to trace every agent back to a human

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

When AI Agents Act 1,000 Times Faster, Runtime Becomes the New Security Frontier

Tim’s LinkedIn

In my conversation with Tim Youngblood, the first CISO at Dell and a veteran security leader at T-Mobile, McDonald's, and Kimberly-Clark, we got into the wave he thinks is reshaping security right now: identity as the new perimeter, and the AI agents moving through it.

Tim has watched every major shift, from antivirus giving way to EDR, to cloud, and he frames this one the same way. "Identity is a new perimeter, and along with that is the evolution of AI and now AI agents. We've got this new digital workforce that's come into the environment, and people are trying to figure out what to do, because it changes how you view identity, how you access data, endpoint security, all of it."

The part that sharpened my own thinking was his point about actions at machine speed. His example was an AI agent handling patient health data. "If that agent takes an errant pathway and starts sending information to the wrong patients, it happening one time, okay, that's a problem. But AI can take action 1,000 times more than a typical human. So 1,000 times of that happening is a completely different kind of problem." Whether the cause is malicious or just a learning error, the moment an action happens now carries far more weight.

This is exactly why I keep pushing on runtime. A lot of the identity companies that came to market a couple of years ago focused on governance and setting up guardrails, which matters, but the piece many of them miss is runtime control: actually preventing shadow IT and stopping people from using unsanctioned third-party AI tools in the moment. If the governance rail is not built, people will find a way around it. Runtime is a critical component for the future of AI security.

The takeaway for security leaders: the old stack was built to watch humans, and AI goes around all of it. You need visibility into what AI is actually doing across identity, data, and endpoints, and the ability to catch a bad action at runtime, not in a report after the fact. Governance without runtime enforcement is a rule nobody is checking.

The Linux Foundation Is Building an Open Standard to Verify AI Agents

CIO Dive

The Linux Foundation is preparing the Agent Name Service, an open standard built on DNS that would let enterprises authenticate and identify AI agents at scale as they operate across the internet. The foundation said enterprises face growing challenges authenticating and governing agents, and that extending proven DNS infrastructure to AI agents addresses the security and identity challenge before it gets out of hand. The urgency is visible in the numbers. Only 11% of technology executives feel prepared for the scale of agentic AI deployment expected over the next year, according to IBM's Institute for Business Value, and two-thirds of CIOs and CTOs say they are held accountable for AI systems they cannot fully control. Governance frameworks are not keeping pace with agentic adoption, according to Deloitte.

Trusted identity infrastructure for agents is about to become table stakes, and most of us are not ready. The instinct will be to wait for the standard to settle before doing anything. That is the wrong move. You do not need ANS to start an agent inventory, assign each agent an owner, and scope its access. Do that work now, while your agent count is still small enough to map by hand. When the standard lands, you will be adopting it. Everyone else will be excavating.

— Zack Tembi

The Senate Bill That Would Make You Trace Every Agent Back to a Human

CIO.com

Senator Mark Warner's discussion draft, the AI AGENT Act, would require providers of "custodial user agents" to register with the Federal Trade Commission before accessing interfaces maintained by large online platforms. The bill defines such agents as software authorized by a user to act on their behalf in a transparent, documented, limited, and revocable way, and would require large platforms to support access by approved third-party agents. For enterprises, the proposal is an early regulatory test for agentic AI. Linking an agent to the user who authorized it creates a continuous traceability requirement for that agent's actions, which could force CIOs and CISOs to rethink how they track agent activity and assign responsibility for automated decisions. Analysts noted it could also expand incident response planning to cover actions initiated by AI agents, with revocation likely proving the most consequential issue, since companies must be able to define what access is being withdrawn and across which systems.

Regulation is arriving before most organizations have an agent inventory, and that ordering is going to hurt. Continuous traceability from an agent's action back to the human who authorized it is not a compliance checkbox you bolt on later. It is an architecture decision. If you cannot today produce a list of every agent, its owner, its scope, and a log of what it did, you are not going to produce one under a deadline. The revocation piece is the sharpest test: pull an agent's access right now and see whether you actually know every system it touched.

An AI agent ran a full ransomware attack end to end, no human at the keyboard.

🗞️ At A Glance

It went from failed login to working fix in 31 seconds.

The agent encrypted 1,342 config records, then threw away the key.

Entry point: an unpatched Langflow server holding cloud credentials.

Palo Alto buys Portkey as agent gateways consolidate into a category.

Entrust's CIO: agents need owners, audit trails, and kill switches.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Ram Krishnan named Chief Information Officer at Lobel Financial

Appointed CIO of Lobel Financial, a consumer finance company specializing in the purchase and servicing of automobile contracts
Will lead technology strategy, digital transformation, information systems, cybersecurity, and IT operations
Brings deep experience across product strategy and delivery, go-to-market execution, cloud technologies, security, analytics, enterprise software, risk management, and compliance
Mandate includes strengthening cybersecurity and data governance, modernizing core platforms, and identifying emerging technologies to improve operational efficiency
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Plexus Worldwide

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Centrus Energy

CIO, W.E. O'Neil Construction

CIO, tms

CIO, Dynamic Campus

Did you like today's newsletter?

The security chair is becoming the top tech seat

Zack Tembi — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The security chair is becoming the top tech seat

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week, we’re focusing more on vulnerabilities and security:

Tim Youngblood, the first CISO at Dell, on why the security chair is becoming the top technology seat
Cybersecurity is no longer the CISO's job alone as AI spreads across every function
The State of the CIO: the average tech chief now wears 1.6 executive hats

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

The CISO Is Becoming the Top Technology Leader, Not Just the Head of Security

Tim’s LinkedIn

This week I sat down with Tim Youngblood, a genuine legend in our industry. Tim was the first security leader at Dell and went on to lead security at T-Mobile, McDonald's, and Kimberly-Clark. He now sits on three boards and invests in early-stage companies. When someone with that much road behind them tells you the role is changing, it is worth listening.

I asked Tim what he is watching for the next decade of tech. He went straight to the shifting shape of the CISO job. "I'm starting to see this switch and change in the role of the CISO to action, being at the seat of the table with the rest of the business," he said. Part of the reason is structural. "Thanks to AI, every company is a technology company now. And the board is starting to slowly change and reflect that too, bringing more technology leaders onto board seats, although it's not happening very quickly."

Then he named the shift that stopped me. "You're starting to see where you have CIOs reporting to CISOs now. I've started to see that in multiple industries. Or CISOs now being promoted into CTO." His logic is clean: once you have owned security, you already understand how the entire infrastructure and technology stack works, which puts you in a position to guide all of it.

The takeaway Tim left for security leaders is a challenge. "CISOs have to really build that muscle and be prepared for those opportunities to be the head technology leader, not just the head of security anymore."

I could not agree more, and it maps to what I keep telling our community. The leaders who will define the next wave are the ones who stopped treating security as a silo and started treating it as the vantage point from which you can run all of technology. If your ambition is the top technology seat, the security chair may be the best possible on-ramp, but only if you have built the business fluency to go with it.

Cybersecurity Is No Longer the CISO's Job Alone

CIO Dive

CIO Dive reports that the spread of AI across the enterprise is breaking the traditional model where cybersecurity sat squarely with the CISO and IT. With HR using AI for hiring, finance running agents for procurement, and legal leaning on AI for contracts, security teams can no longer govern every decision in isolation. The emerging pattern is shared responsibility: a technology leader such as the CIO owns which AI models get used, the security team puts the controls in place, and people-focused teams like HR handle enforcement of policy violations. Deloitte found that the biggest challenge for tech executives is no longer control, but coordination of an organization's tech strategy, a shift underscored by the additional $6 billion enterprises are set to spend on AI models and agents in 2026.

This is the structural change behind everything Tim described. When security decisions are being made in every department, the CISO cannot be the lone gatekeeper, and the CIO cannot pretend AI risk is someone else's problem. The job becomes orchestration: setting the model policy, wiring in the controls, and getting HR, legal, and finance aligned on who enforces what. That is a leadership skill, not a technical one. The executives who learn to coordinate across the C-suite will run this. The ones still trying to personally approve every tool will be routed around.

— Zack Tembi

The State of the CIO: One Leader, 1.6 Jobs

CIO.com

CIO.com's 25th annual State of the CIO survey, covering 662 IT leaders and 249 line-of-business users, captures a role stretched across more territory than ever. The average CIO now juggles 1.6 positions, frequently absorbing chief security officer, CISO, and chief AI officer duties on top of the core job. Nearly half of respondents (46%) now view the CIO as a business leader who proactively identifies opportunities and aligns technology to them, and 83% see the CIO as a changemaker. Cyber and data security climbed as a top CEO priority, cited by a quarter of respondents, up from 20% a year ago, while IT leaders expect to expand their involvement in AI and machine learning (76%), agentic AI (70%), and cybersecurity (63%).

The 1.6 number is the whole story. The market is not creating three tidy roles for AI, security, and technology. It is piling all of it onto one leader and calling that leader a business executive. That is an opportunity if you have built the range to carry it, and a trap if you are still defined by a single technical lane. Pick the two or three areas where you can credibly own the business outcome, get fluent enough in the rest to govern it, and stop thinking of security, AI, and IT as separate jobs. Your board already sees them as one.

EU AI Act goes fully live August 2.

🗞️ At A Glance

OT security now reports to the CISO at 53% of industrial firms.

Microsoft pours $2.5B into embedding engineers with customers.

HP to roll out OpenAI's agentic platform across its operations.

OpenAI and Anthropic push into services, reshaping the AI race.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Rory Meleniclis named Chief Information Officer at Intact Insurance, Global Specialty Lines

Appointed CIO to lead the next phase of technology transformation across Intact's global specialty lines business, spanning core systems, cloud, and data-driven decision-making
Brings more than 20 years leading technology teams inside highly regulated financial institutions
Most recently held senior technology leadership roles at Royal Bank of Canada, running global teams across payments, data, and cybersecurity
Track record in cloud modernization and platform renewal, with an emphasis on using AI, machine learning, and data to sharpen performance and risk management
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Transdev North America

🤝 Jobs

CIO, nVent

CIO, Saltee Co

CIO, The Goodwin Group

Did you like today's newsletter?

The CISO job moved from defending to building

Zack Tembi — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The CISO job moved from defending to building

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week, we’re focusing more on vulnerabilities and security:

When Breaches Hit the Boardroom
Woo An, CEO of Zaun, on the one question that matters more than any SOC 2 checkmark
Verizon's DBIR: third-party involvement in breaches doubled in a single year

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Read the original article

When Breaches Hit the Boardroom

One of the sharpest moments from our DC Executive Forum came later in the evening, and it reframed everything that followed: the CISO role is no longer just about defending. It is about building. Engineering teams are now reporting directly into Security at some organizations, and if you are a security leader who has not picked up a builder's mindset, the job has already moved past you. I have felt this shift firsthand. The leaders who are winning right now are the ones who stopped thinking of security as a gate and started thinking of it as a capability they can design and deploy.

That conviction set the tone for June 25th at Tysons Corner. We brought together senior technology and security executives for a closed-door conversation on crisis communication, boardroom dynamics, and what it actually means to lead through a breach. The panelists have been in that room. The moderator has sat at the highest levels of institutional leadership.

The relationship question came up early and stayed central throughout the evening. You cannot introduce yourself to the board during a crisis. The relationships with your CEO, CFO, General Counsel, and board members have to exist before anything goes wrong. If the first time a board director hears your name is in a breach notification, you have already lost the narrative. Trust is not something you manufacture under pressure. It is something you deposit in advance, in normal times, in quiet conversations, in the boardroom updates nobody thinks matter until they suddenly do.

That connects directly to a distinction that does not get enough attention: the difference between a technical incident response plan and a board incident response plan. Most security organizations have detailed playbooks for the technical side — isolation, forensics, recovery. Far fewer have an equally detailed plan for the board level: who calls whom, what gets said, how the organization controls the narrative externally while managing the response internally. These are not the same plan. A breach that is handled cleanly on the technical side can still destroy shareholder confidence, regulatory standing, or patient trust if the communication layer is not thought through in advance. The organizations that weather crises best are the ones that rehearsed the conversation before they needed to have it.

What I kept coming back to throughout the evening was how much of this comes down to proximity. Security leaders who are embedded in the business, who have built real relationships across the C-suite, who treat the board as an audience that deserves context rather than just compliance updates — those are the ones who get the benefit of the doubt when things go sideways. And things go sideways. That is not a question of if. It is a question of whether the foundation was laid.

None of this conversation happens without the right people in the room. I am genuinely grateful to our panelists Brad Christmas and David Reese for bringing real operational depth to this topic — not theory, but experience earned the hard way. And Mercy Tembon held the whole evening together with a level of precision and warmth that made every voice in the room feel heard. Thank you as well to our sponsors Zaun and AegisAI for making the evening possible. Events like this only work when the right partners believe in what you are building.

If you want to continue this conversation: Book time with Zack Tembi — 30 minutes

The One Question to Ask Every AI Vendor

Woo’s LinkedIn

As CIOs and CISOs evaluate their security stack for the back half of the year, I asked Woo An, CEO of Zaun, the question I think matters most: what should our peers be asking their vendors as those vendors start bolting AI into everything?

His answer cut straight past the usual checklist. "The big thing these folks need to ask is, what is the security that you're applying to your own company? Who is your security leadership, and what does your security actually look like?" The reason, Woo explained, is that the old proof points no longer carry weight. "People understand these SOC 2 check marks are not really cutting it anymore." He pointed to the drama in San Francisco around SOC 2 compliance companies faking reports, and argued it is now more important to understand what a vendor is doing with its own AI systems, how it builds controls, and whether it lets customers apply their own controls on top.

So the sharper question is: what are you doing outside of SOC 2 and ISO? That is a hard one to answer, and Woo noted it is exactly why buyers build their security questionnaires and run real due diligence. The catch is that the whole process is about to change and speed up, because leadership is telling teams to procure in two weeks rather than twelve months.

I told Woo I think security is going to become a genuine revenue differentiator, not just a cost center. For a lot of enterprises, the moat they build around their data is going to be part of how they win business, and they need their third-party partners doing the same. Many are not today. When I evaluate a vendor now, the tell is whether they eat their own dog food. On every demo, do I see a new feature shipped? When a customer asks for something on a call, does it show up in the product days later? The companies that pair that customer obsession with the speed of modern AI tooling are the ones that will lead. As Woo put it, you have to use it yourself before you can sell it.

The takeaway for CIOs and CISOs: add one question to every vendor evaluation this quarter. Ask what they do for their own security beyond SOC 2 and ISO, and whether you can enforce your own controls inside their product. The answer separates the partners worth your data from the ones that just passed an audit.

Third-Party Involvement in Breaches Doubled in a Single Year

Verizon Business

Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report found that third-party involvement in breaches doubled from 15% to 30% in a single year, the largest single-year shift the report has ever recorded. The exposure model has widened well beyond the classic vendor questionnaire: SaaS providers, managed service providers, cloud integrations, APIs, software dependencies, identity providers, and privileged vendor access all now create real attack paths. A supply chain compromise costs $4.91 million on average and takes 267 days to identify and contain, the longest lifecycle of any breach vector tracked. On the developer side, more than 454,600 new malicious open source packages were counted in a single year, a 75% jump.

This is the number that should reset how you think about your attack surface. When a third party is involved in nearly one in three breaches, your security posture is no longer defined only by what you control. It is defined by every vendor you have handed data or access to. A point-in-time questionnaire describes a supplier on the day they filled it out, not the day they get compromised. Move the critical vendors to continuous monitoring, tier them by the access they hold, and treat the supplier ecosystem as your default initial-access path, because attackers already do.

- Zack Tembi

🗞️ At A Glance

ServiceNow confirmed unauthorized access to customer data, a fresh reminder that even core enterprise platforms sit inside your third-party risk surface.

Microsoft's June Patch Tuesday addressed a record 206 vulnerabilities, including 39 critical flaws and an actively exploited Defender zero-day.

A self-replicating worm called Miasma hit numerous GitHub repos, prompting Microsoft to add a two-hour delay on automatic VS Code extension updates.

npm is now the highest-yield malware registry on the internet, with malicious-package detections up more than 100% year over year.

Europe's DORA and the SEC's incident-disclosure rules are converging on one demand: prove how you are monitoring your suppliers.

IBM's 2026 research found that 56% of tracked vulnerabilities can be exploited without any authentication, a basic hygiene gap at enterprise scale.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Richard Heeley appointed Chief Information Officer at Westpac

Joins Westpac, one of Australia's largest banks, as CIO, coming from Macquarie Group where he was CIO for Banking and Financial Services
Will own technology infrastructure, engineering, and cyber security as the bank runs Project Unite, its roughly A$3 billion four-year technology simplification programme
Earlier led a core banking transformation at Nationwide Building Society and held senior roles at Barclays and JPMorgan Chase
Succeeds Scott Collary, joining later this year
Read the full story

Colin Boatwright named first Chief Information Officer at Trinity

Appointed Trinity's first-ever CIO, leading enterprise technology, data infrastructure, and AI-enabled solutions for the life sciences commercialization firm
Brings more than 30 years across life sciences, healthcare, and high-growth organizations
Most recently led global IT, business intelligence, and cybersecurity at UPS Healthcare Precision Logistics, formerly Marken
Held senior leadership roles earlier at Syneos Health, IQVIA, and Ironshore Pharmaceuticals
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Vaco by Highspring

CIO, Lutz

CIO, Smith & Wilkinson

CIO, Tarkett

Did you like today's newsletter?

Two-thirds of CIOs are accountable for AI they don't control

Zack Tembi — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:08:00 +0000

Two-thirds of CIOs are accountable for AI they don't control

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Woo An, CEO of Zaun, on why you cannot govern what you have never built yourself
A new IBM study: two-thirds of CIOs are accountable for AI systems they do not fully control
Info-Tech LIVE 2026: AI execution is pushing CIOs back to IT fundamentals

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

Build It Yourself Before You Buy It: A CIO's AI Adoption Test

Woo’s LinkedIn

One of the best pieces of advice from my conversation with Woo An, CEO of Zaun, applies whether you run a security team or sit in the CIO chair: go build something yourself.

I asked Woo how a CIO should approach AI adoption when the space changes week by week. He started with the build-versus-buy question, because it is the one every leader is wrestling with. Teams are going to build a lot of custom tooling and buy a lot of AI products at the same time, and the CIO has to understand the tradeoff. "You need to understand the pros and cons of building your own tool and enforcing your own security control based on your compliance, versus buying something where you have less control if it's a SaaS product." The best case is a SaaS tool that already meets every control you need, but Woo was blunt that this is extremely rare right now, close to impossible. His advice was to stay on top of it and figure out when the ROI flips from build to buy.

Then he gave the answer that stuck with me. "Whether you're a CIO looking to get into AI, or a new grad in computer science looking for a job, just go out and build projects. Use these AI tools and build a website, build a tool, build something. You have to feel it. You have to understand how people are going to use this. Then you can dig into the mechanisms of how it works, where the gaps are, and where the signals are actually useful."

I could not agree more, because it mirrors my own experience. As I built out our agent infrastructure at SingleFin, now dozens of agents running internally, it changed my lens on the world completely. But the moment I started deploying agents at scale, I saw exactly how many places security could become a serious problem. You do not see that from a slide deck. You see it from building.

Woo made the same point about leadership credibility. "If you don't use AI yourself and understand why you're enforcing it, the rest of the org won't adopt it. There's a fakeness that shows if you tell people to do something and you don't do it yourself."

The takeaway for CIOs and CISOs: you cannot govern what you have never used. Build a small AI project this month. The gaps you find by hand will shape your strategy better than any vendor briefing.

If you want to discuss our AI development path: Book time with Zack Tembi: 30 minutes meeting with Zack Tembi

Two-Thirds of CIOs Are Accountable for AI They Do Not Fully Control

IBM

A new IBM Institute for Business Value study of 2,000 C-level technology executives found that as AI moves from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, two-thirds of surveyed CIOs and CTOs report being held accountable for AI systems they do not fully control. The lack of visibility is widespread: 70% say teams across the business are deploying technology faster than IT can track. At the same time, technology leaders face growing pressure to scale AI faster, even as many lack the governance structures to support it.

This is the number that names the problem I hear every week. The accountability has already landed on your desk. The control has not. When 70% of leaders admit the business is shipping AI faster than IT can even see it, you do not have a technology gap, you have a governance gap. Start with an inventory of what is already running, then build the approval and monitoring layer around it. You cannot be accountable for a system you cannot see, and right now most CIOs are signing up for exactly that.

- Zack Tembi

AI Execution Is Pushing CIOs Back to IT Fundamentals

PR Newswire

Info-Tech Research Group's Best of 2026 Mid-Year Report finds that AI has moved from a strategic ambition to an execution challenge, and CIOs are responding by concentrating on the foundations required to scale it with confidence. The report, drawn from the firm's most-accessed research across the first half of 2026, shows strong demand for guidance on AI execution, cybersecurity, data, infrastructure, governance, risk, and workforce readiness. The throughline from Info-Tech LIVE 2026 was direct: AI value depends on disciplined execution, strong governance, and reliable data foundations, not on the newest model.

The industry spent two years treating AI as something separate from the IT discipline that came before it. The correction is here, and it is healthy. Clean data, access controls, change management, and a real governance framework are the boring work that determines whether AI delivers or stalls. If you built those foundations over the last decade, this is your moment. If you skipped them to chase pilots, the bill is coming due. The fundamentals were never optional, and AI just made that obvious.

- Zack Tembi

A German court ruled Google is directly liable for false claims its AI Overviews generate, treating the output as Google's own speech.

🗞️ At A Glance

Dun & Bradstreet found 97% of organizations have active AI initiatives, but only 5% say their data is ready.

Analysts are skeptical of Oracle's outcome-based AI pricing, calling token pricing a poor fit for enterprise budgeting.

Every major data platform now ships a universal semantic layer for AI, but the standards remain unsettled and siloed.

The FinOps Foundation found 98% of practitioners now manage AI spend, up from 31% two years ago.

Info-Tech LIVE 2026 drew thousands of CIOs under one message: AI value comes from execution and governance, not the newest model.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Chaim Mazal named Chief Information Security Officer at GitLab

Joins GitLab to lead the company's global security organization, covering both the business and the platform
Comes from Gigamon, where he served as Chief AI and Security Officer overseeing security and AI governance
Will help shape GitLab's approach to AI security as enterprises adopt AI agents and face emerging AI-driven threats
A former GitLab customer, brought in for that practitioner instinct alongside his security depth
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Guarantee Trust Life Insurance

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Inside Higher Ed

CIO, ARC by ChargeItSpot

CIO, Dynamic Campus

CIO, CONMED Corporation

Did you like today's newsletter?

The AI Tools Your Org Adopted in Two Weeks Have No Security Behind Them

Zack Tembi — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0000

The AI Tools Your Org Adopted in Two Weeks Have No Security Behind Them

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Guest Lecturing at UCLA Anderson
Woo An, CEO of Zaun, on why the AI your teams already use is the part you cannot see
FinOps X 2026: managing AI spend is now nearly universal, and token prices are not coming down

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

What I Took Away From Guest Lecturing at UCLA Anderson

Great seeing Cy from Aegis, as always!

This week I had the privilege of guest lecturing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, spending time with the next generation of technology and business leaders at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and enterprise strategy. A few things the conversation reinforced for me, and all of them apply directly to the CIO chair.

Technology initiatives are won or lost on how clearly they communicate measurable business value. The best-engineered projects stall when the business case is not made in terms the organization can act on. Building support also requires understanding the economic and personal motivations of your stakeholders, not only the technical problem you are solving.

AI agents are changing the speed of decision-making, but extracting real value takes continuous iteration. The first deployment is rarely the one that delivers. And the same capabilities expanding your competitive surface are expanding your attack surface at the same time. Security has to be a first-principles consideration in AI strategy, treated as foundational from day one.

The final point generated the most discussion: long-term competitive advantages compound. Organizations building seriously around AI and cybersecurity today are creating leads that will be increasingly difficult to replicate in three to five years. The window is open now.

Grateful to the UCLA Anderson community for the invitation. These conversations with future leaders are a reminder of why the work matters.

👉 If you want to talk shop, grab 30 minutes on my calendar.

The AI Tools Your Org Adopted in Two Weeks Have No Security Behind Them

Woo’s LinkedIn

I sat down with Woo An, CEO of Zaun, who is building security for the post-AI enterprise. Woo came up through Palantir on the defense side, with a traditional ML background before that, and he has a sharp read on where enterprise AI adoption is outrunning enterprise security.

I asked him about the new threat surfaces showing up as companies roll out copilots, MCP servers, and SaaS with AI baked in. His answer reframed how I think about the gap.

"The biggest enterprise adoption we're seeing are the coding agents, your Claude Code, your Cursor, your Copilots," Woo told me. There are a handful of ways to protect the org in that space, he explained, like writing a simple rule that blocks a destructive command before it runs. The problem is everything outside the coding agents. "People aren't looking at the AI tools inside HubSpot or Salesforce or Glean," he said. "AI is being used in many different places other than coding agents, and enterprises don't really know the risks there."

What makes it worse is the pressure from the top. The board and the CTO are enforcing that everybody use AI because it means efficiency and better margins. "But the CIOs are like, I don't have a choice in the matter. I have to adopt these tools in two weeks, but then I have no security capability, no security monitoring. They're getting fire hosed, and they still have to do their day jobs, which is protecting from adversaries across cloud and endpoints."

That matches what I hear constantly. I asked Woo where the single biggest blind spot is, and he named two: visibility into the tools already in use, and cost. Most organizations, he said, do not even look at the telemetry coming out of their coding agents. And when a major AI vendor changes its pricing model, an org can burn a full quarter of budget in a week.

The takeaway for any CIO: inventory the AI already running in your SaaS stack before you greenlight the next tool. The coding agents are visible. The AI quietly embedded in the platforms your teams already pay for is where the exposure hides.

- Zack Tembi

Managing AI Spend Is Now Nearly Universal, and Token Prices Are Not Coming Down

At FinOps X 2026 in San Diego this week, the FinOps Foundation's State of FinOps 2026 report landed with a number that reframes the discipline: 98% of practitioners now manage AI spend, up from roughly 31% two years ago. The survey of 1,192 organizations also found 90% now manage SaaS costs and a growing share track licensing and private cloud, and the Foundation formally widened its mission from managing the value of cloud to managing the value of technology. A recurring warning from the event: many teams budgeted assuming token prices would fall, but GPU and energy constraints mean those costs are structural. The FinOps and Linux Foundations announced a joint effort to build open, unified standards for AI billing across providers.

This is the macro version of what Woo described to me on the podcast. The cost surprise is no longer a cloud problem, it is an AI problem, and it is hitting nearly every organization at once. If you are still treating AI spend as a line item somebody will reconcile at quarter end, you are already behind. Put financial telemetry next to your AI workloads now, before the bill teaches you the lesson.

- Zack Tembi

OWASP's 2026 agentic AI security report now catalogs real CVEs and breach reports, with coding agents driving most of the new attack data.

🗞️ At A Glance

Cyera raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation to keep building a trust layer for the age of AI agents.

Oracle posted $19.2 billion in Q4 revenue with OCI up 93% and a $638 billion backlog driven largely by AI infrastructure contracts.

Oracle is rolling out outcome-based AI pricing, charging per business result rather than per token, though analysts caution the meter is still running behind the scenes.

Amazon claims its data centers are now seven times more water-efficient than the industry average as AI buildouts strain resources.

CIO.com reports that an organization's most AI-savvy employees are often the ones quietly driving shadow AI.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Brian Saluzzo named Chief Information Officer at Citi

Joins Citigroup, the global financial services firm based in New York, as Managing Director and CIO
Comes from Google, most recently VP of core developer engineering and product management
Held senior technology leadership roles earlier at American Express and infrastructure leadership at Goldman Sachs
Holds a BA from SUNY Geneseo
Read the full story

Kemal Cetin appointed Global Chief Digital & Information Officer for Mars Snacking

Will lead digital, data, and technology for Mars' $36B Snacking business, home to M&M'S, Snickers, Pringles, Cheez-It, and KIND
Joins from FrieslandCampina, where he was Chief Business and Digital Solutions Officer and an Executive Team member
Nearly three decades across global FMCG, including Diageo, Coca-Cola Enterprises, and Whirlpool
Early mandate includes integrating the acquired Kellanova brands and scaling AI and analytics, effective August 3
Reports to the Global President of Mars Snacking
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

Virtual CIO, eMazzanti Technologies

🤝 Jobs

CIO, SAHARA Las Vegas

CIO, tms

CIO, Medpace

CIO, Vaco by Highspring

Did you like today's newsletter?

Only 20% of CIOs say AI met expectations. Here's what's missing.

Zack Tembi — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:10:00 +0000

Only 20% of CIOs say AI met expectations. Here's what's missing.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Why culture, not technology, kills enterprise transformation (Anthony Enoh of Enbros Technologies joins me)
CIO.com's annual survey shows AI ROI remains elusive for most IT leaders
BCG finds 42% of AI users save a full day per week, but 66% get zero guidance on how to use it

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

💡 Culture Will Kill Your Transformation Before Technology Ever Gets a Chance

Anthony’s LinkedIn

This week, we’re still featuring Anthony, CEO and Founder of Enbros Technologies. Anthony spent years in UK defence and intelligence before leading cyber transformation programs at PA Consulting and Atos across Northern Europe. He has seen enterprise transformation from every angle, and his take on the biggest blocker was blunt.

"Culture kills everything," Anthony told me. "Most people have the desire to change, but the will to change is rarely there."

That resonated. I see it constantly. We work with some forward-thinking companies that embrace new technology, but the majority of large organizations struggle with the same friction Anthony described.

He laid out the people-process-technology framework as a reminder that technology always comes last. "Technology supports a business process," he said. "There's a reason why PPT, people, process, technology in that order, has lasted."

Anthony shared a striking example from his last major engagement: a nuclear regulator. Their entire organizational DNA was built around not changing things. "When you work in those environments, the incentive is not to change," he explained. "This has been assured, signed and sealed. Do not change anything." Try delivering a technology transformation into an organization whose core fabric is about stability and risk aversion.

For CIOs leading transformation, the takeaway is clear: start with culture, not technology. Understand the organizational appetite for change before writing the first line of code. The best architecture in the world fails if the people using it refuse to move.

— Zack Tembi, CEO, SingleFin

Less Than 20% of CIOs Say AI Has Met Expectations

CIO.com's 25th annual State of the CIO survey of 662 IT leaders found that fewer than one in five report AI initiatives meeting expectations. Only 53% have established any formal approval process for AI projects, and less than half have defined metrics for measuring AI success. The survey signals a clear pivot: CIOs are moving away from open-ended experimentation toward structured governance, cross-functional oversight, and clearly defined KPIs as the baseline for scaling AI.

This tracks with what I hear from clients every week. The organizations seeing real returns are the ones that built the governance framework first and deployed AI second. If you still do not have formal approval workflows and success metrics for AI projects, you are running blind. The technology works. The organizational discipline around it is what separates winners from everyone else.

- Zack Tembi

AI Saves Workers a Full Day Per Week, But No One Tells Them What to Do With It

Boston Consulting Group's fourth annual Global AI at Work Survey, covering 11,749 employees across 14 markets, found that 42% of regular AI users save more than a full day per week. The problem: 66% receive no guidance on how to redirect that time, and more than half do not channel it toward strategic work. The report, titled "AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools," argues that efficiency gains without workflow redesign produce no measurable business value.

The State of the CIO survey says AI is falling short of expectations. But BCG's data shows AI is already saving workers a full day per week. Both things can be true at the same time. The technology is delivering real efficiency gains. The problem is that most organizations have no mechanism to capture them. CIOs are measuring AI against ROI targets while their teams are quietly banking eight hours a week with no direction on where to reinvest it. The gap between "AI works" and "AI delivers value" is entirely an organizational design problem.

- Zack Tembi

Palo Alto Networks' GlobalProtect VPN flaw (CVE-2026-0257) is being actively exploited in the wild, with attackers bypassing authentication without credentials days after disclosure.

🗞️ At A Glance

Oracle launched its new monthly patch cadence with 35 fixes, including 11 critical flaws and a CVSS 10.0 REST Data Services vulnerability that enables full gateway takeover.

President Trump signed an AI executive order requesting voluntary 30-day pre-release government access to frontier models, while explicitly barring mandatory licensing requirements.

Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC, setting up what could be the most significant AI public offering to date.

Tech employers added 69,000 jobs in May, led by cloud infrastructure and IT services hiring, even as Meta and Cisco announced AI-related layoffs.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Margaret Cartwright appointed CIO for ACERTUS

Previously SVP of Data Intelligence and Pricing Systems at US Foods ($36B revenue)
Former CIO at AgAmerica, an agricultural lender
Held senior roles at Tech Data (now TD Synnex, $60B IT solutions)
Will oversee enterprise technology, infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, AI, and digital initiatives
Nearly three decades of leadership experience in enterprise transformation
Read the full story

Williams Racing (F1) taps Dr. James Smith as new CIO

Over a decade at Google with experience at DeepMind
Co-founder of Human Native AI
Will build scalable AI infrastructure across the F1 organization
Team principal James Vowles: "The latest battleground in F1 is the ability to harness data and AI across all parts of the team"
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Transdev North America

🤝 Jobs

CIO, Glacier Bancorp

CIO, Medpace

CIO, Vida Group International

Did you like today's newsletter?

Your first AI agent invoice will scare you. Here's how to fix it.

Zack Tembi — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:25:45 +0000

Your first AI agent invoice will scare you. Here's how to fix it.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Anthony Enoh on why not every task needs an agent, and the FinOps discipline that saved his margins
Vanguard proves AI ROI is possible. Only 12% of executives can say the same.
Verizon's DBIR shows vulnerabilities now cause more breaches than stolen credentials

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

💡 Not Every Task Needs an Agent: A FinOps Lesson Learned the Hard Way

Anthony’s LinkedIn

A lot of companies are getting scared away from AI because they think it is a costly venture. I actually believe the opposite, that it is high value and relatively low cost, especially for mundane tasks. But controlling costs requires discipline, and Anthony Enoh, CEO of Enbros Technologies, learned that lesson firsthand.

"One of the first agents we built, we used 100% inference and it was very expensive," Anthony told me. "We were very eager to show value and we just started seeing the bills. The customer had visibility because we believe in transparency. He got on a call and said, what's going on here?"

That moment forced Enbros to build a dedicated FinOps team. Their lead developer wrote a paper titled "Not Every Task Requires an Agent." The design philosophy: use frontier models for specific tasks, push routine work to lower-tier models, and use open-source where appropriate.

The takeaway for CIOs: build FinOps into your AI program from day one, not after the first surprise invoice. Match model tier to task complexity. Treat cost optimization as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time exercise.

— Zack Tembi, CEO, SingleFin

Vanguard's AI Investments Pay Dividends

Vanguard has moved from AI experimentation to measurable business impact by anchoring every use case to a clear hypothesis and quantifiable outcome before scaling. Under Global CIO Nitin Tandon, the firm created an AI champions program with senior stakeholders who set priorities across client-facing and shared service functions, paired with digital ambassadors who surface bottom-up innovation at the operational edge. One standout: an Expert Insights tool in Financial Advisor Services that uses AI to analyze investor portfolios and generate improvement narratives, helping scale specialist expertise as FAS demand has quadrupled in six years. For context, PwC found that 56% of CEOs report no significant financial benefit from AI, and only 12% have achieved both cost and revenue gains.

Vanguard is doing what most enterprises claim to want but fail to execute: tying AI to business outcomes before they scale. The dual structure of champions and ambassadors is worth studying. Top-down strategy without bottom-up experimentation stalls. Bottom-up tinkering without executive sponsorship never gets funded. You need both.

- Zack Tembi

Vulnerabilities Have Become Cyber Attackers' No. 1 Door to the Enterprise

CSO

Verizon's 2026 DBIR, analyzing 31,000 incidents across 145 countries, shows a dramatic shift in how attackers get in. Exploited vulnerabilities now account for 31% of breaches, surpassing credential abuse at 13%. Only 26% of CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities were fully remediated in 2025, down from 38% the prior year, while median patch time stretched to 43 days. Ransomware appeared in 48% of breaches, and AI-assisted attacks are compressing exploit windows from months to hours. Supply chain risk is equally alarming, with 48% of incidents involving third-party breaches.

Patching is falling behind, and attackers are getting faster. A 43-day median patch time against AI-accelerated exploitation is a losing equation. CIOs need to push vulnerability management from an IT operations function to a board-level priority with real accountability and real deadlines.

- Zack Tembi

Global public cloud spend now exceeds $700 billion with 20-30% estimated waste, making FinOps a governance imperative for CIOs and CFOs alike.

🗞️ At A Glance

Snowflake is acquiring MCP-focused startup Natoma to strengthen governance, security, and connectivity for AI agents operating across enterprise environments.

Researchers discovered TrapDoor, a malware campaign spanning 34+ malicious packages across npm, PyPI, and Crates.io that targets developer workflows and AI coding tools.

IBM and Red Hat launched Project Lightwell, a $5 billion initiative deploying 20,000 engineers to discover and patch open source vulnerabilities at enterprise scale.

Microsoft and EY committed $1 billion over five years to support enterprise agentic AI adoption, including deploying trained forward engineers directly into client environments.

The FBI warned that the Silent Ransom Group is sending fake IT support personnel into offices to insert malicious USB devices and steal data.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Chris Ballard Appointed EVP & CIO at Northwest Bancshares

25+ years of technology leadership across financial services
Previously CIO, Shared Services Operations at Wells Fargo, where he built a KYC platform and deployed AI agents
Prior tech leadership at JPMorgan Chase and PNC, leading AI platform and core banking transformations
Mandate: advancing technology, operational efficiency, and customer experience across Northwest's footprint
Read the full story

Cumberland Farms taps Murphy USA tech chief as new CIO

20+ years of technology leadership across convenience retail and restaurant industries
Previously CIO at Murphy USA for 5.5 years, overseeing all technology initiatives
Former CIO and CDO at Focus Brands (now GoTo Foods), leading tech, digital marketing, and analytics across seven international food service brands
Earlier: CIO at Jack in the Box, leading technology and strategic alignment across both the Jack in the Box and Qdoba brands
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

🤝 Jobs

Did you like today's newsletter?

35,000 CISOs for 359 million businesses. Do the math.

Zack Tembi — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:00:00 +0000

35,000 CISOs for 359 million businesses. Do the math.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!

This week:

Anthony Enoh on why your proprietary data is the last competitive moat AI cannot commoditize
Only 35,000 CISOs for 359 million businesses. The CISO talent crisis is accelerating.
A malicious VS Code extension breached 3,800 of GitHub's own internal repos

Let’s make this week a game-changer.

Stay sharp. Stay ahead.

💡 Guest Expert Insights: Your Data Is Your Last Competitive Moat in the Age of AI

Anthony’s LinkedIn

Security is the first objection most CIOs raise when we start talking about AI deployment. I brought this up with Anthony Enoh, CEO of Enbros Technologies, and his response was more radical than I expected.

"In the age of AI, most things will be commoditized," Anthony said. "So if everything is commoditized, what value does a business really have? It's their proprietary data, their intellectual property, their brand identity, and human interaction. Those are the three things that are un-AI-able."

Anthony's thesis is that organizations should build their own technology stacks rather than relying on SaaS products. "We predict a future where there will be less SaaS products because organizations can build it themselves," he told me. "By owning your own technology stack, you protect your intellectual property. You own where it sits, whether in Azure or GCP. You create and protect that proprietary data, because ultimately that is what is going to be your competitive edge."

I agree with the core principle. We tell our customers the same thing: own your data. Anthony and his team at Enbros build custom solutions within dedicated tenants owned entirely by the customer, not by Enbros. "We're not GPT wrappers," he said. "We build our agentic systems from the ground up within tenants that are owned wholly by the organization."

The architecture he described puts data at the center, with proprietary technology wrapped around it and human interactions on the outer layer. Everything flows from that protected core.

This is a strategic question every CIO needs to answer right now. How much of your organization's competitive advantage lives inside someone else's SaaS platform? How much of your data is scattered across agents and tools you do not control? The commoditization wave is real. If your only differentiator is the same AI tools everyone else is using, you have no moat.

— Zack Tembi, CEO, SingleFin

Why the CISO Role Is Becoming More Demanding in 2026

Cybercrime Magazine

There are only 35,000 CISOs worldwide serving approximately 359 million businesses. That is a 10,000-to-one ratio, and the gap is widening. Gartner predicts that by 2028, half of all CISOs will manage disaster recovery alongside incident response, significantly expanding their scope beyond traditional security. Meanwhile, experienced professionals are leaving the role due to personal legal liability concerns, budget constraints, and relentless scope creep. Cybersecurity has moved from a technical discipline to a boardroom governance imperative, yet most organizations lack the leadership structures to address this evolution.

If your CISO is still buried three levels below the C-suite, you are not treating the threat with the seriousness it demands. The talent exodus is real and accelerating. CIOs need to advocate for their security leaders at the executive table, fight for their budgets, and restructure reporting lines before the next breach forces the conversation.

- Zack Tembi

GitHub's Internal Repos Breached via Malicious VS Code Extension

Cyber Security Dive

GitHub confirmed unauthorized access to approximately 3,800 internal repositories on May 20, 2026. The attack originated through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension installed on a GitHub employee's device, which provided attackers with developer environment access and enabled lateral movement across GitHub's infrastructure. Compromised data includes internal source code, proprietary development tools, CI/CD workflow data, and organizational configurations. A threat group known as TeamPCP has claimed responsibility and is seeking $50,000 to $95,000 for the stolen dataset on underground forums. GitHub states customer repositories were not impacted.

If GitHub's own internal repos can get breached through a bad IDE extension, every enterprise running developer tools at scale needs to audit its extension ecosystem right now. The developer supply chain is the new attack surface. CIOs who treat endpoint security and developer tooling as separate conversations need to combine them immediately.

- Zack Tembi

Microsoft is deploying "forward-deployed engineers" to EY for agentic AI rollout across the consulting giant's client base.

🗞️ At A Glance

Google Cloud Next 2026 unveiled Agentic Defense with Gemini-powered Threat Hunting and Detection Engineering agents for autonomous SOC operations.

OpenAI launched Daybreak, a new cybersecurity platform, with Cloudflare, Cisco, and CrowdStrike as early partners.

Exaforce raised a $125M Series B ($725M valuation) to build AI that catches cyberattacks in real time.

Gartner projects 40% of enterprise apps will embed AI agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, but nearly half run without security oversight.

SAP unveiled the Autonomous Enterprise at Sapphire 2026 with 50+ domain-specific AI assistants orchestrating 200+ specialized agents.

💡 CIO Spotlights

Raj Singh Appointed EVP & CIO at Diebold Nixdorf

Nearly 30 years in tech leadership across financial services, automotive, and energy
Previously VP & CIO at Visteon Corporation (enterprise AI, cloud, cybersecurity)
Earlier roles at Ford Motor Company, DTE Energy, Horizon Global, Ally Financial
Mandate: global IT ops, cybersecurity strategy, generative AI, SAP modernization
Read the full story

Jeff Lagana Appointed CIO at McNees Wallace & Nurick

Fortune 500 and AmLaw 100 experience; previously at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney
Built "Artifex," a proprietary legal AI platform that became a revenue-generating asset
Zero-breach record; 100% success rate on client security audits over nearly a decade
Mandate: enterprise tech strategy, security, innovation, firm-wide digital transformation
Read the full story

🗞️ Submit a Section

Want to be featured in the next edition of CIOsurge?

CIO, Lobel Financial | Anaheim, CA

🤝 Jobs

CIO, QualDerm Partners

CIO, NEBCO, Inc. | Lincoln, NE

CIO, SmartStop Self Storage | Ladera Ranch, CA

CIO, Vaco by Highspring | Toledo, OH

Did you like today's newsletter?