The CIO Has Left the Server Room. What Does That Mean for Cybersecurity?

By Resham Ganglani, CEO of Halodata Group  

Data from the recent Salesforce second annual CIO survey, as reported by IO World Asia, shows that global AI implementations surged by 282% year-on-year in 2025. Beyond this headline figure for AI adoption, the reporting also shows that the role of the CIO (and related technology leadership positions) in business is rapidly changing.

What Does the Reporting Show?

As the headline of the IO World article proclaims, 96% of APAC CIOs say that the expansion of AI has required them to develop their skill sets. That headline figure is remarkable, but what lies beneath it is more revealing. The top skills CIOs have been developing are not technical ones: 53% have focused on enhancing their leadership skills, 55% on storytelling and narrative-building, and 75% on change management and communication. The CIO role has moved out of the server room and into the boardroom. 

As AI expands across organisations, the partnership between the CIO and the CEO is strengthening. CIOs now bear responsibility for aligning executives, creating adoption strategies, and integrating AI into daily routines. This marks a significant shift with serious implications for everyone working in cybersecurity across APAC. 

The reporting also shows that 98% of APAC CIOs say their organisations either currently use or plan to use agentic AI within two years, and that AI budgets have nearly doubled, with 29% of that increased budget allocated to agentic AI. The pace of AI adoption is not slowing.  

What This Means for CIOs and Other Technology Leaders

When the CIO shifts into a change agent and business strategist, security discussions must rise to that new level. For too long, cybersecurity has been viewed as merely a technical field, something to consider during procurement decisions and infrastructure assessments.  

Fortunately, the perception of cybersecurity as an integral part of core business management has been evolving over recent years. The shifting role of CIOs is speeding up this change in perception. 

If the CIO now acts as a key driver of business transformation, security vendors, resellers, and advisors need to be able to speak that language as well. We cannot afford to remain in purely technical debates while our most important stakeholders in clients have moved beyond them.

What Are the Main CIO Concerns? 

The top concern CIOs have regarding AI in their organisations is data security and privacy, closely followed by a lack of trusted data. Despite this, the reporting suggests that only 15% of IT budgets get allocated to data security, and that only 29% of APAC CIOs are fully confident they are investing correctly in AI with proper integrated data governance. That’s a notable gap between what the surveyed CIOs claim to fear and what they actually fund. This gap is exactly where we, as cybersecurity professionals in the region, need to focus.

The View from Halodata 

At Halodata, we collaborate with organisations across Southeast Asia and witness this tension unfold in real conversations. Business leaders grasp, on an abstract level, that AI introduces new attack surfaces, data risks, and compliance challenges. What many lack is a clear, commercially grounded framework for managing those risks without hindering the pace of adoption that they are under immense pressure to accelerate. 

APAC CIOs are transforming into business leaders who also have a deep understanding of technology. Those of us in cybersecurity must follow suit. We need to develop boardroom vocabulary, change-management awareness, and the commercial acumen to operate effectively in their world. 

The window for cybersecurity professionals to position ourselves as strategic partners rather than as technical support is open now, but won’t be open forever. 

The age of experimentation in AI is ending. The age of scale-out has begun. Cybersecurity and cybersecurity professionals must adapt to this changing marketplace.