CXOInsights by CXOCIETY
CXOInsights by CXOCIETY
PodChats for FutureCIO: Trends shaping the CIO agenda for 2026–2027
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A recent Gartner survey found that only 28% of AI use cases fully meet ROI expectations, with a further 20% failing outright. For Asia-Pacific CIOs, the bottleneck is clear: it is not the model, but the governance and orchestration layer beneath it.
In 2026, the challenge has shifted from experimentation to industrialisation, demanding a focus on taming "agent sprawl" and mitigating "shadow AI" risks.
As Celine Siow, VP of Sales, GM for APAC at Workato argues, the control plane must be platform-agnostic to avoid recreating fragmentation. The path to 'production-ready AI' lies in a robust, vendor-neutral governance layer that ensures trust, interoperability, and measurable business value.
She joins us on this edition of PodChats for FutureCIO to elaborate further on her arguments for a platform-agnostic control plane as CIOs orchestrate the industrialisation of AI.
1. With only 28% of AI projects meeting ROI targets, how can we build a formal "value playbook" to ensure our AI investments deliver tangible, measurable business outcomes?
2. As "agent sprawl" becomes the new technical debt, how can we architect a neutral control plane to govern, orchestrate, and observe our growing fleet of autonomous agents?
3. Given that 80% of workers now use unapproved AI tools, how can we move from simply blocking "shadow AI" to enabling governed, safe adoption across the entire workforce?
4. What does an effective governance framework look like when AI moves beyond content generation to action management, requiring real-time control over permissions, escalation, and audit trails?
5. With AI infrastructure costs set to run up to 30% higher than planned, how should our FinOps practices evolve to manage this new cost volatility, including token-based consumption?
