“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.
My take: When agents are free to work, chat, design, code, buy, sell, and self-organize 24/7 the demand for compute will become limited only by compute availability itself.
Agents are Jevons Paradox... embodied.
PC & smartphone demand was always bounded by one thing: people.
But what if billions (or more) of agentic AIs aren’t bounded by people at all?
What happens when they never sleep…
…when they work, talk, design, buy, sell, and decide 24/7?
What then happens to compute demand?
Q1 2026 saw more AI investment by VCs than any quarter before by a large margin.
AI is turning into the biggest tech revolution in history.
But most orgs have many years of learning how to get what... they expect from it.
Skills, not money, is the actual currency of adoption.
Most people still think AI competition is about models.
But the real race just became obvious:
Whoever controls the GPU clouds that run the models will quietly control enterprise AI.
Today’s ...@CoreWeave–@AnthropicAI deal is a big reminder…
Big news: CoreWeave just signed a multi-year agreement with @AnthropicAI to support the development and deployment of their Claude AI models.
9 of the top 10 AI model providers now run on CoreWeave. When scale and reliability are non-negotiable, CoreWeave is the platform that
Tech’s acceleration paves CIOs’ path to the corner office
AI especially is paving the path from CIO -> CEO as the next wave of business transformation is fundamentally tech-driven.
Tech’s acceleration paves CIOs’ path to the corner office
Holistic views of enterprises afford IT leaders a unique advantage should they decide they want to become CEOs, say CIOs who have done just that.
www.cio.com
Most people still miss who has a clear shot at being the most disruptive AI player of all:
SpaceX
It’s the only firm with a plausible path to controlling every layer of the emerging AI ...infrastructure:
Chips, models, global connectivity, and virtually unlimited launch for the
A4) That is the big Q! Even if we invented a time machine, our prior selves from only a few years ago might not believe what we told them about 2026. Worse yet, short-term pressures might still not... let old-us prepare to be new-us. #ciochat
@dhinchcliffe #CIOChat A3: CIOs need to view AI not as a tool but rather as an organizational capability that has purpose: to positively change how the business operates. By doing so, tools change, ...teams change and they change. All for the better
My take: Enterprise knowledge will soon stop being a “soft asset.”
AI is turning decades of tacit expertise, playbooks, and tribal know-how into owned, highly operational capital. 📈
When ...companies combine that with real business model redesign, with new decision rights, strong
@Brett2point0 @joannefriedman @gjmount It’s really about both. But increasingly tech so infuses the business there is almost no dividing line.
Look at e-commerce. It’s become a monster industry ...domain in its own right. A huge amount of unique knowledge, most of it defined by the tech used.
#CIOChat
@dhinchcliffe @joannefriedman ...somewhere, @gjmount is grinning ear-to-ear! 😁 So you mean that it IS about technology (and, NOT about the "business problem" and "use cases")?!
@joannefriedman @dhinchcliffe There's a lot of that. Thinking back to CIOs I've served under, I hope some of the ones who were ahead of their time(s) 7-10 years ago haven't given up. The industry ...may have finally caught up to the ideas they were puahing back then. #ciochat
#CIOChat Good chat today. Join us at 2pm ET next Thursday. Topic: The Vanishing Talent Pyramid
Hope you enjoy our movie tie-ins to intro next week’s topic.
Please suggest topics and invite your ...IT colleagues. Every Thursday at 2pm ET.
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