AI is completely changing what companies expect from their IT leaders. Speaking at the CIO of the Future Summit in Tanzania, Siael Macha, head of digital innovations at Mwananchi Communications, explained why IT leaders must now also act as risk managers.
For the past few years, AI has dominated conversations in almost every space with questions focusing on adoption and implementation. During the CIO Summit held in September in Tanzania, participants discussed how AI was impacting their work as tech leaders. From the discussion, it emerged that AI is changing not only what organisations can do, but also what people expect from their technology teams. While presenting a summary of the main points raised during the discussions, Siael Macha of Mwananchi Communications, described AI as a force that is reshaping the role of IT leaders and making their judgment more important than ever.
“AI penetration is actually changing how IT leaders need to think. It’s really forcing us as IT leaders now to be risk managers,” she said.
Siael advised tech leaders to help organisations weigh AI’s potential against the risks of adopting it too quickly or without appropriate safeguards.
That responsibility includes acting as a bridge between people with very different levels of technical confidence. For instance, Siael noted that organisations now have two groups of people: one that is tech-savvy and familiar with shadow IT, which also poses cybersecurity risks, and another that is not quite as technical.
“If you are someone in the IT space, you have to find that balance in between the two groups,” she said.
She also warned that AI can create expectations that technology teams cannot always meet.
“Before someone comes to IT with projects or something that they need, they have already checked to see if this is implementable or not, and they have their own timeframe because they think anything is possible with AI,” she said.
Unfortunately, research has found an AI execution gap in most organisations where a significant percentage of AI projects fail to deliver business value owing to unrealistic expectations and a lack of proper foundational groundwork.
For Siael, this gap between expectation and reality makes IT’s advisory role essential. Tech teams must help the business understand what is feasible, how long work may take, and what protections should be in place. She pointed to the rush to develop countermeasures and controls to protect organizational data, emphasizing that guidance and risk management need to accompany innovation.
In her closing remarks, Siael urged organisations to embrace current trends while taking care to make adoption safe and inclusive.
“As we embrace, let us also create a safe space for our users to take part in current trends. Particularly with AI, we must create a safe space for our users to be able to integrate because it does have positivity in it,” she said.
