People
People
Rob Hornby
Co-Chief Executive Officer - London
AI is changing what the technology function needs to do. The harder question is whether organizations are changing how they structure, measure, and staff it.
The AlixPartners Disruption Index puts the tension in numbers: 84% of executives report rising productivity, yet 49% worry their employees' skills are becoming obsolete. The two statistics are not contradictory — they are sequential. What is working today is built on capabilities that may not survive the next phase of the transition.
"While the technology is advancing quickly, institutions are still grappling with how to govern, evaluate, and embed systems that are inherently probabilistic within structures designed for predictability and control."
Key themes
CIO: from IT operator to business architect
The CIO has never been a static role, but the current evolution may be the most consequential yet. As the role moves from IT operator to business architect, CIOs become accountable for technology returns rather than technology costs, measured on revenue enabled rather than tickets resolved, and reporting to CEOs rather than CFOs. When technology is central to competitive strategy, the organizational structure should match the ambition.
New metrics for a new mandate
The current metrics used to govern technology functions reward the wrong things. Budget variance measures compliance with a plan. Tickets resolved measures throughput. Neither captures whether the technology function is helping the organization grow, compete, or change faster than its rivals. AlixPartners' reformulated metrics are organized around what the function actually produces: revenue enabled, returns on technology investment, AI pilots that reach production and deliver measurable P&L impact, and a technical debt index that makes the cost of inaction visible at board level. The goal isn't better reporting. It's making the connection between technology investment and business outcomes legible to those outside the technology function.
The tech workforce in transition
The technology workforce is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, AI is eliminating the economic rationale for offshore delivery, automating the routine work that junior developers learned on, and threatening BPO models built on exactly the kind of repetitive back-office tasks agents now handle more cheaply. On the other, legacy skills in COBOL and mainframe are aging out of the market faster than organizations have planned for, creating a scarcity that no amount of budget can quickly fix. In between sits the role the market needs most and has least of: the agentic supervisor. This role consists of cognitively demanding work that requires a different and more intensive kind of attention than execution ever did. Protecting that capability while managing the disruption around it is one of the least-discussed challenges of the AI transition.
Our State of Enterprise Technology Report is split across the following chapters. Click through to learn more:
2026 State of enterprise technology
AI is not just changing what technology does for enterprises, it has the potential to change how they are structured, how decisions get made, even what business they are fundamentally in.
Our expert insights cover the whole terrain, from the mechanics of AI-native engineering to the financial exposure building in cloud and vendor contracts to the newly pressing question of software and data sovereignty.
