For the modern CIO, “AI automation” is more than just a line item that the board requested. Boards aren’t asking for pilot programs anymore; they’re demanding automated remediation frameworks in months, not years.

Why? Because every company across every industry today is an IT company. At its core, IT is ensuring business outcomes happen as expected, on schedule, and without major issues. Outages translate to lost revenue, partnerships, and in some cases, even lives.

Companies are Reconsidering Cloud Dependence

In the move to the cloud, we were all naive about service levels. We’ve since learned that the internet is the backbone, and thus it’s the single point of failure. You don’t have to look further back than the AWS outage of October 2025 or the Cloudflare outage of November 2025.

Over the past few decades, companies have gone through quite the lengthy adoption curve. First, they moved all their workloads to AWS for training and enablement, simplicity of management, monitoring support, and frequent updates. Next, they decided to go multi-cloud because they needed to distribute their workloads, spread out their risk, and avoid vendor lock-in. If AWS was down, at least they had other parts of the business running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, or pick your favorite alternative.

Now, companies are back to building their own data centers for a whole litany of reasons, AI being one of the key ones. They’ve concluded that data is their moat, and they want to control their data center to power their AI playbook, which will deliver highly performant, secure, and compliant results using their data. It’s a strategic repatriation that the public cloud can’t always guarantee.

As such, internet performance monitoring is a must-have. Companies need to monitor the hyperscalers to predict any degradation of service and reroute traffic and compute accordingly. This is the new normal.

Hyperscalers aren’t going away, but they are going to start ratcheting down entitlements, discounts, and the flexibility they used to give their compute customers to win the market. This will only further push customers not just to have a multi-provider strategy, but to consider their own data center as part of their long-term plan and how they manage their estate.

Maybe you build apps on AWS, manage desktop computing on Microsoft Azure, and do your analytics and search with Google Cloud. These are almost like operating systems for each part of your stack, whether you’re running a tech company or a bank.

Different Non-Tech Industries, Same IT Demands

When I was growing up, changing banks was a big deal. My kids have grown up with the mentality of “if it’s not working well in less than 30 seconds, I’m out.” They don’t just close the app, they delete it, cancel the subscription, and move their entire balance to a competitor by dinner. Not only are they gone and never coming back, but they’ll also tell all their friends, using social media, in unfiltered, super direct feedback: “Don’t ever use that bank. They’re terrible. They charge you for wires. Use this bank instead.”

My son changed his bank three times because he wasn’t getting the level of service he wanted: Quick access to funds, the ability to get no-cost loans at will, and get wires done at no charge. “Dad, what are you talking about? Are you going to pay for a wire? Who does that? Nobody does that anymore.”

Switching costs are effectively zero, and digital seamlessness trumps brand loyalty. Banking clients today want access to the best interest rates and lending rates, ideally with no fees. Most importantly, though, they want to have easy-to-use online banking that is always available, performant, and secure. For banks today, their online banking service is everything. Nobody wants to go to a branch.

Most of this is not unique to banks. I met with an SVP at a major oil and gas company a few months ago. They have 18,000 locations that must be always on and always up. That is a mission-critical network, and the team needs real-time dashboard access to every drilling site so that any C-suite executive or board member can check the status of an exploration project, retail location, and so on, anywhere in the world.

Health care is not much different. At intake, Slalom found that 68% of patients want a blend of in-person and digital environments. Patients expect real-time online access to their caregiver and physician, their prognosis in real time, recommendations, their insurance provider coverage, and the results of their last appointment. They also want to be able to book their next appointment, ask about seeing a specialist, and understand their next steps.

Health care providers are directly correlating their tech offerings to patient outcomes, which in turn correlates to how many beds they are turning, how many appointments they are driving, and how many docks are being fully utilized.

IT is No Longer a Support Function

We could go industry by industry. At its core, every company is an IT shop. Indeed, a McKinsey 2025 survey found that 64% of top-performing companies say their technology leaders are “very involved” in crafting enterprise strategy. IT has moved from being a “support function” to being the very air businesses breathe.

All these examples have the same requirement: automating IT operations. Not every company is saving lives, but every company needs IT to achieve their business mission. Whether it’s 18,000 remote oil rigs or a city-wide hospital network, the requirement is the same: zero-latency reliability.

If the network is unexpectedly down, it’s unacceptable for a health care provider to lose connectivity with patients or for an emergency room not to have connectivity to perform surgeries. This is why every CIO is talking about IT automation, regardless of the industry their company is in: banking, oil and gas, health care, you name it.

Across every industry, CIOs are discussing what keeps them up at night: Observability, data hygiene, and potential hallucinations, because reliability, security, and compliance are what keep their business online.