r/CIO

Curious how CIOs are approaching governance as AI moves from experimentation into actual business workflows.

Are you mainly focused on model/vendor approval, or are you also governing what an AI agent is allowed to do once it's connected to enterprise systems?

Things like action-level permissions, human approval for high-risk actions, audit trails, data boundaries, and short-lived credentials seem increasingly important as agents become more capable.
Would be interested to hear what governance controls you've found genuinely useful in production, rather than just on paper.

We're mid-renewal on a platform that costs us close to $400K a year. I asked around to understand the original reasoning, since renewal is a good moment to check if it's still the right call. Turns out the person who ran that evaluation left the company in 2023. There's no writeup, no comparison doc, nothing in Confluence beyond a one-line ticket saying "approved." Two people who sat in on the vendor demos vaguely remember there was a cheaper option that got ruled out, but not why. So we're stuck either renewing blind or re-running a full evaluation from scratch, on a system we've already built two years of workflows around. How does your org handle this when the person who made the call is gone? Is there an actual process, or does it just get relitigated from zero every time?

I’ve been looking into AI governance for the last few months and, to be honest, I’m trying to understand what this actually looks like inside real companies — not what the frameworks say it should look like.
I’d really like to hear from people who are actually dealing with AI governance, risk, compliance, security, privacy or data governance day to day.

A few things I’m really curious about:

How does your organisation actually keep track of all the AI systems being used across the business?

How do you work out which systems are high-risk and what controls need to apply?

Where does all the evidence actually live — policies, assessments, approvals, vendor documentation, testing, audit trails, etc.?

What are you still managing through spreadsheets, emails, SharePoint, Jira or a collection of different tools?

When an AI system changes, how do you know that the risk/compliance assessment needs to be looked at again?

What’s the most painful or time-consuming part of AI governance for you at the moment?

If you already use an AI governance or GRC platform, what does it still not do particularly well?

And probably the question I’m most interested in:

If you could make one part of AI governance disappear tomorrow, what would it be?

I’m not trying to sell anything here. I’m trying to understand where the genuinely difficult problems are before deciding what is actually worth building.
So if you’re doing this in the real world, I’d genuinely appreciate the brutally honest version.

Even if the answer is:

“Our process is a complete mess.”

That’s useful to know.

I’m particularly interested in what’s happening in smaller and mid-sized organisations that don’t have massive AI governance teams and endless budgets.
Would really appreciate hearing how people are actually dealing with this.

As the title suggests, I just started my first IT Director role (more functionally the CIO, but I digress) and I keep running into this same brick wall with leadership about spending money.
Basically, our IT department is a guy with his first IT Job out of college, and an "MSP" but the MSP is just a guy who does networking related work occasionally.
So outside that, all IT Support, IT Administration, Engineering, etc is all done by this IT Engineer. This is obviously not sustainable, there's a lot wrong with this setup, single point of failure, the fact that a lot of the work is much more experienced than the guy doing it, etc.
We are a company with multiple locations and a little over 400 employees. The company grew but the IT Department stagnated. Our prices are also bound by legislation and so there isn't really a way to increase funding to make things work so there's limited resources.
I explained all these risks and said that the IT Department didn't grow with the org, and that in order to get back up to speed with it, we'd have to spend some money to get there (hire additional employees with experience, software to automate and replace manual tasks, move away from vendors and own our tech stack, etc.) and they basically boiled it down to "we don't have the money, sorry!"

My problem with this whole thing is that IMO, what I'm asking for isn't some shiny new toy or something that makes the department just slightly better, I'd argue that due to the size of the company and all the work involved, these changes are necessary to run the department and do business.
I just don't know if I'm not explaining it right, or if there's maybe some "trick" to making executives understand that running an entire IT department off a fresh college grad is an awful design and will definitely implode on itself sooner if not later. But that's why I'm here.
Any tips? Ideas?

Well technically five but will give another month until my resignation is official. I posted to this reddit a few months after I started and received some good advice but Im back because I'm still unclear of if I'm making the right decision. Since I have started as the CIO at this company ($55 million a year, 400ish employees, 1200 endpoints, 80+ unique apps, healthcare) I have had the following negative interactions:

1. I Have no budget, not like 0 dollars of budget but literally no budget. Every item has to be approved by the CEO. I've had to ask this person to purchased $25 worth of cables. Its exhausting.

2. We have no schedule of contract renewals. Some of the big ones I was able to find through our vendor but every month I get at least two or three usually for over 20k and since I have no budget I literally have to go to the CEO and ask for the renewal and hope we A: Have the money, B: I don't get yelled at for it. I'm working on a schedule.

3. I had an employee (a direct report) i moved into a position that we needed and they were very interested in. The CEO moved them back and I got berated for not asking the CEO first (the employee immediately resigned).

4. I'm a "functional" CIO because we only have 5 total IT staff. This means I get to do multiple jobs a day. I'm also the only one allowed to be admin of the ERP system because "someone may look at something they should not."

5. My pay is about that of a high level analyst at my last company.

6. I'm the CISO as well but I do not have a background in security. I've asked if we could fill that gap and had a plan ready. That plan was rejected and we instead are looking at an MSP. The conversations with the MSP happen mostly without me being in the room. This is by the CEO's request.

There is a lot more bad. I was offered another role with another company, much lower in pay but less responsibility. Yet all of this I still feel bad like I should be trying to make this work and to stick it out. So i'm back here asking for advice, move on only after six months or try and stick it out for longer?

I started a new job, Director title and higher pay. During the interview process I asked multiple times about the reporting structure and what autonomy I would have to run the team. I never got a clear answer. Red flag number one. I join and unbeknownst to me, a new leader above me was also hired before I started and he literally micromanages every decision, dozens of useless meetings, and IMO very little has been done since I've gotten there. From what I gather, he talks a good game but doesn't have the skills to backup what he's saying to higher ups which turns into him being terried to make decisions. Even worse, the team as a whole is totally unqualified to do the needed work. I've decided to jump ship and look for something else. Even with the pay and the title, I can't do this longer term. In scope compared to my last role this place is a step down although the title and pay say otherwise. Have others been in a similar situation? What did you do and how long did you stick around?

Hi all,
Looking for some candid career advice.
I’ve been in tech for ~20 years and at the same ~1,000-person company in London for the past seven. I was previously CIO and now Chief Innovation Officer, after the business felt my strengths could be better used in a more business-facing role focused on AI and innovation.

My background is broad rather than niche: Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, GCP, security/NIST, data protection, governance, infrastructure, enterprise systems, data/analytics, warehousing, ITIL/service management etc. I’ve run teams and technology functions and worked extensively with senior executives.

I’m not a software engineer, but I’m highly technical. I know the cloud ecosystems well, can quickly work out which services could solve a problem, interrogate architectures, challenge engineers and turn fairly ambiguous business problems into potential technical solutions.

That’s increasingly what I do with AI: work with the business, understand the problem, decide whether AI actually makes sense, shape the solution and bring the right people together to build it.

I think my strongest skill is probably sitting in the middle of business + technology + people. I think very quickly, generate ideas easily, and I’m comfortable having technical conversations one minute and an executive conversation the next.

The problem is that I’m not sure where that profile fits outside my current company.
I’m also probably unusually disconnected from the wider tech market. I’m not a big LinkedIn poster, I don’t go to networking events, and having spent seven years at one company I feel a little isolated from what roles and organisations are actually out there.
I’m starting to wonder whether I could have much more impact in a larger organisation, consultancy or AI company.

Forward-deployed work really appeals to me — getting close to difficult business problems and figuring out how technology can solve them — but I’m conscious that Forward Deployed Engineer roles generally expect serious coding ability, which isn’t me.

So for those of you in bigger organisations or hiring at this level:

1. What roles would you actually point someone like me towards?
2. Are there roles adjacent to forward deployment that value technical breadth, problem solving and executive relationships more than coding?
3. Is being a broad technical generalist still valuable at senior levels?
4. Where would you look if you were in my position?

And, perhaps most importantly, how do you start breaking into that wider network when you’ve spent years largely outside it?

I’m not particularly attached to having “Chief” in my next title. I’m much more interested in finding somewhere I can have a bigger impact.
Would genuinely appreciate candid views.