C-suite executives are losing confidence in the ability of their IT teams to deliver basic services, leading to concerns over how advanced technologies like generative AI can be implemented successfully.
According to a new survey of 2,500 C-suite executives, conducted by IBM, only 47% of respondents believe their IT teams are effective at delivering basic services, compared to 69% back in 2013.
Breaking it down by role, 36% of CEOs had confidence in their IT teams, compared to 64% in 2013, and 50% of CFOs had confidence, compared to 60% in 2013.
Forty-three percent of respondents said that generative AI is contributing to their growing concern, because they are wanting to focus on optimizing their infrastructure for scaling generative AI.
For this to be successful, two-thirds agreed that there needs to be strong collaborations between CFOs and the rest of the C-suite. Yet, only 39% of non-CFO respondents said they “collaborate with finance to embed tech metrics into business cases,” and 35% of CFOs said they are engaged in early IT planning.
For companies that do have strong collaboration between the two, they tend to report 12% higher revenue growth.
“Tech leaders today are grappling with multiple business demands, made even more complicated by the rise of generative AI. They must navigate the challenges of modernizing their IT infrastructure and scaling generative AI to support the business’ core competitive advantage,” said Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of IBM Consulting. “In this evolving AI landscape, the relationship between tech CxOs and their finance counterparts has never been more important, aligning technology spend with business outcomes to drive real value from AI investments.”
