Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development
McKinsey Reveals How Top Performing Firms Are Redefining Tech Leadership
Before artificial intelligence dominated every technology conversation, the successful CIO focused on keeping business systems up and running while keeping costs in line. But in 2026, the picture is changing.
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Today’s CIO needs to be a business strategist in addition to a savvy technology manager, according to McKinsey’s Global Tech Agenda 2026. And the most successful companies will be those who leverage technology to gain real business value rather than those who view it as a back-office function.
Successful strategies deploy AI at scale and with velocity while still maintaining security and compliance.
“The core reason is that technology is becoming more central to the business agenda and the business value creation agenda,” said Rahil Jogani, a McKinsey partner and co-author of the report.
“Previously, there was a lot about tech support or tech enablement. Now, tech becomes much more central in the strategy, customer enablement, customer experience, and revenue as well as productivity and cost-related value creation,” he said.
McKinsey surveyed more than 600 technology leaders and found that among top performing companies organizations that reported at least 10% revenue and EBIT growth last year – 64% said their CIOs and senior tech leaders were “very involved” in shaping business strategy, as opposed to 52% of other organizations.
“There’s a shift from, ‘Hey, I’m going to run IT,’ to ‘I’m going to focus on the enterprise value creation agenda.’ It’s a very different mindset,” Jogani said. The tech road map should be reimagined as the value road map tied to enterprise priorities and measurable outcomes changes.
The CIO strategist thinks beyond the basics such as modernizing systems and ensuring resilience, and focuses on enabling what Jogani called “value pools,” such as growth, margin expansion, customer experience and innovation. They need to be asking “what are the four, five, six, seven big value pools for the company that will drive growth … and how do I as a technologist enable that?” Jogani said.
Leading companies are moving away from project-based IT delivery toward product and platform operating models. “You’re not owning projects, you’re owning products,” Jogani said. “A project is when you focus on how to deliver an output … versus if you’re owning a product, you’re focused on the business outcome.”
In step with these trends is a reorientation of how technology strategy and planning operate. Iterative planning cycles are replacing annual refreshes as the pace of innovation and change accelerates, and the report finds that 29% of companies now co-create technology and business strategy throughout the year. For top performers, that rises to nearly half.
“The traditional mindset of ‘I’m going to plan once a year,’ That is shifting,” Jogani said. Quarterly business reviews should assess projects and outcomes, reallocate resources and adjust priorities. Initiatives don’t need to be overhauled, but he said about 10% to 20% could be adjusted. And product and platform teams should be empowered to make changes and propose pivots.
“It’s not just the CXO team that needs to do this work,” Jogani said.
These strategic and mindset shifts are all done in the name of enabling velocity, which is emerging as a primary success metric.
“Velocity is becoming a big driver to competitive differentiation,” Jogani said. “Who can get to market quickly, who can iterate quickly, who can refine quickly, who can test things quickly – that is a driver to differentiation.”
The push for velocity is all enabled by AI, which surpassed cybersecurity and infrastructure modernization as top tech investment priorities for CIOs in the next two years. Top performing companies are also increasing their tech budgets, and 28% plan to spend at least 10% more on technology this year.
Yet many companies are still struggling to get AI projects off the ground, and Jogani said that he has seen many reports talking about how AI projects aren’t generating value, or are stuck in pilot or proof of concept phases.
Missteps come when companies overextend AI ambitions by “waiting for a thousand flowers to bloom,” he said. Companies should instead target three to five areas where AI can reshape workflows and decision-making and focus. They should also focus on areas where they can create tangible metrics that can be tracked to see if AI is providing real value.
The biggest hurdle companies face on the path to becoming an “intelligent enterprise” is the talent gap. Nearly one-third of respondents said that talent gaps and the challenges of integrating AI with legacy systems are major barriers.
In response, many are turning to “insourcing,” and 48% of top performers said they plan to bring strategic expertise back in house. Commodity work will still be outsourced, but “things that are big differentiators for you, core platforms, strategic platforms, data models, those kinds of things you want to ultimately keep in-house,” Jogani said.
These pushes for velocity and growth all come with added security and compliance risks that CIOs will have to balance as they juggle business and technology priorities, and the challenges remain complex. The successful CIO in 2026 will need to balance speed and control.
“It’s not trivial, to be honest,” Jogani said. “None of it should come at the expense of the foundational pieces like security, cyber and resilience. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to everything.”