What CIOs Must Get Right For The AI Era
CIO, Wednesday, February 11th, 2026
CIO Hall of Famer Shelia Anderson offers an IT leadership blueprint for architecting the strategies, alignment, culture, and balance necessary to succeed as AI acceleration takes hold.
In an era defined by AI, automation, cloud scale, and rising customer expectations, today's CIOs are navigating a once-in-a-generation strategic inflection point. The pressure to modernize legacy environments has never been higher. The demand for speed, innovation, and business value has never been greater. And the challenge of getting it all right at the same time has never been more complex.
Shelia Anderson, chief information and digital officer at Unum Group, describes this moment as 'managing the dance': the dance between stabilizing and modernizing the core while accelerating new digital capabilities; between protecting the enterprise and empowering it; and between delivering for customers today and architecting a future where AI and automation fundamentally reshape how work gets done.