Businesses are launching into AI investments and it’s having a profound effect on every aspect of the organization including how work gets done. The organizational shifts are wide-ranging and deep — affecting what kind of talent companies need and how job roles are defined.
Experts believe businesses will spend ample time and resources in 2026 revamping processes in response to AI adoption as they look to upskill workers and rethink operations. IT is not immune, but CIOs can play a larger role in guiding their companies and steering collaboration to usher change.
In some areas such as recruitment and customer service, the shift has been in play for a while. Software development, for example, saw a generative AI boom last year with the rollout of AI coding tools.
“We have one big technology customer we work with that has shifted 25% of their developers to prompt engineers,” said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis U.S., referring to employees who specialize in crafting inputs for generative AI models. “We’re definitely seeing the changes. I don’t think folks are 100% sure what that’s going to look like, but it is evolving.”
Alongside the addition of new job categories and changes in some job descriptions, companies are doubling down on existing roles that touch AI. Mitchell said the firm has tracked an uptick in demand for the roles supporting AI deployment, including data scientists, data architects and AI engineers.
AI adoption’s effect on the tech workforce is complex, but evolving, according to a CompTIA analysis published in November. Almost two-thirds of businesses acknowledged AI as cover for unpopular staffing decisions, including hiring freezes or layoffs. But among companies that used AI to replace positions, 48% said they reallocated workers to other positions.
“AI’s relationship to human effort via automating and augmenting workflows will mean many job roles will change; new job roles will emerge, and some job roles will fade,” the IT trade group said in its report.
For IT job categories, change in roles and responsibilities has been uneven thus far, according to Forrester VP and Principal Analyst J. P. Gownder.
“There’s been a lot of automation and AI that’s been used in things like the helpdesk,” Gownder said. “Some years back, you would often have somebody who was running around doing password resets. That’s going to look different from an information security analyst who is going to have to use AI tools … but it is more of an augmentation tool.”
As companies adjust role expectations, CIOs can help steer organizations through change by focusing on the upskilling potential of in-house workers both within and outside of IT.
“We need to find ways to use AI in a way that will help us to be more effective in solving problems,” said Gownder.
Culture shifts and training
As AI changes the definition and scope of IT roles, CIOs can navigate the transition by putting the spotlight on underlying processes — training their employees along the way to help them adjust.
“You’re going to have to foster skills that operate quicker, that embrace innovation and that are really focused on taking that reimagination approach with this technology, so that you’re fundamentally doing different things,” said Audi Rowe, EY Americas AI experience, strategy and transformation consulting leader.
Tech executives can start by standing up a cross-functional team of leaders dedicated to rethinking processes and training. That’s the approach software company Informatica took to guide its own AI journey, CIO Graeme Thompson told CIO Dive.
The cross-functional team helped put together a training curriculum that featured external resources, including Coursera and LinkedIn Learning, to set up common ground understanding around AI definitions.
“The mistake a lot of us made was we thought that if we give GenAI to employees, they’ll become more productive, and somehow that will create a business benefit,” Thompson said. “That’s not working. We have to redesign how the process gets done.”
Agentic AI is adding another wrinkle — introducing new roles and even new kinds of colleagues. The addition of “digital coworkers” means agent management will become a critical skill to hone across the enterprise, Dorit Zilbershot, group VP of AI innovation at ServiceNow, previously told CIO Dive.
“Workers at every level will be responsible for guiding, supervising and optimizing these digital coworkers,” Zilbershot said.
The influx of agents in the enterprise is already shifting employee expectations. A KPMG report found nearly two-thirds of organizations have altered their approach to entry-level hiring in response to agentic AI adoption. The shift underscored rising demand for competencies in data, automation and responsible AI, according to the firm.
Focusing on in-house skills can also help meet that demand, according to Rowe. “As you lean into an agentic way of working, there also has to be an upskilling of the workforce to understand how to shift into different roles, how to shift into roles that are higher value or more focused on innovation, but also roles that are focused on oversight, judgment calls, on making sure that you’re developing and operating in a responsible way,” said Rowe.
Although the task of revamping technology roles is complex, CIOs should find ways to leverage the potential upside, according to Thompson.
Informatica, for example, used an agentic AI tool internally to monitor cloud instances across several providers, optimizing usage and ultimately shaving $1 million in cloud spend last year, he said.
Tasking AI with repetitive tasks once relegated to junior staffers means IT can focus on big picture projects, according to Thompson.
“Plus,” Thompson said, “it gives them another $1 million to innovate.”
