“As AI becomes integral to business strategy, CIOs are being forced to reconsider how and where it’s optimal to deploy compute resources. The need for low latency, cost efficiency, and compliance in AI applications is driving a rapid shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. For IT leaders, this means 2025 will be a pivotal year for a comprehensive realignment of their infrastructure with the realities of the AI era.”
Enterprise IT in 2025 is entering a period of profound reinvention as CIOs push AI beyond isolated functions, wrestle with the immature foundations of agentic AI, and escalate efforts to counter suddenly looming post-quantum threats. Futurum’s Q2 2025 CIO Insights survey reveals 89% of IT leaders driving AI for strategic transformation, 80% elevating quantum-resilient security to board-level priority, and 71% rethinking optimal cloud environments under intensifying AI workload pressures.
Three primary reasons are driving this change.
Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.
The graph of how long AI models can stay on task from
@METR_Evals, showing rapid leaps and bounds recently, referenced above:
For the third essay in my #AIFuturesFor2026 series, let’s explore one of the most important stories in AI right now: It’s not just the growth of model capability, which is undeniably impressive, ...but the shifting frontier between what models can actually do, how long they can do
@MarshaCollier @AkwyZ @sarbjeetjohal @eric_kavanagh @JimHarris @marshallk @david_terrar @ThadOfSphere @emollick @shapshak Exactly right, Marsha. Teaching children all of those things was always ...important, but it’s even more so in the era of AI. Or we won’t be able to instill them in our machines.
Happy holidays and hope you’ve been very well!
@dhinchcliffe @AkwyZ @sarbjeetjohal @eric_kavanagh @JimHarris @marshallk @david_terrar @ThadOfSphere @emollick @shapshak We need to encourage humans to think even more. Teach children to create in ...their own brains first. Because,
"Humans are the source of meaning, ethics, responsibility, and purpose. AI can amplify those things, but it cannot originate them."
As part of getting ready for 2026, I’ve been ruminating over the way artificial intelligence is actively reshaping the very foundations of software development. As a long-time developer and ...enterprise architect, it’s sobering what I’ve witnessed in terms of the capabilities of
The new @METR_Evals data for the time AI models can stay consistently on task has been rising dramatically throughout the year.
It’s precisely the attribute that will make AI able to tackle the ...most important human tasks.
Gains on this dimension alone will be transformative.
As the year ends, I’ve been thinking about the fundamental difference between AI and the human mind. As it turns out, certain uniquely human attributes aren’t just philosophical curiosities. They... are vital assets in the era of AI.
We often begin lists of “human advantage” with
My comments in @VentureBeat about agentic AI and Agentforce:
The platforms that make practical AI agents real are arriving. It’s just very early days yet.
While everyone talks about an AI bubble, Salesforce quietly added 6,000 enterprise customers in 3...
Salesforce added 6,000 Agentforce customers in one quarter, hitting $540M in revenue—challenging the AI bubble narrati...
venturebeat.com
Not content to glide into 2026 after quite a year of strong AI leadership, Google just dropped a whole raft of new model announcements this week.
Will do a roundup soon…
Making the final days of 2025 count ⌛ Here’s everything we dropped this week:
— Gemini 3 Flash, bringing fast frontier intelligence at a fraction of the cost to surfaces like @GeminiApp, AI Mode in Google Search, @GoogleAIStudio, Vertex AI, and more
— CC, a @GoogleLabs
Just recorded my 2026 predictions for AI and the CIO.
A bow wave of strategic change in cloud, security, and IT operations has been building quickly.
I explore what these changes are and how to ...prepare for them.
Link soon!
100 trillion tokens into the AI revolution, a few things are clear now:
- Closed vs open source models remain one of the vital pivot points
- Reasoning models have taken over inference
- OSS model ...market rapidly proliferating + fragmenting
- China on upswing
- 4x prompt size
Vital research on the current limits of LLMs to engage in scientific inquiry + discovery.
Key if AI will ever engage in high-end knowledge work.
Takeaway: LLMs can indeed synthesize new knowledge, ...but the entire downstream process has to improve substantially (and likely will.)
This paper from Harvard and MIT quietly answers the most important AI question nobody benchmarks properly:
Can LLMs actually discover science, or are they just good at talking about it?
The paper is called “Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery”, and instead
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