How organizations can be digitally inclusive

CEOs crave growth—increases to revenue, market share, margin, and the amount of customers they serve. But chief information and chief technology officers remain firmly focused on efficiencies, including infrastructure, application modernization, and basic automation. 

Surveys consistently highlight splintered views at the C-suite level. A survey of 600 IT professionals by Salesforce showed that nearly three out of five say business stakeholders hold unreasonable expectations regarding the speed and agility of new technology implementation. At the same time, a majority of CEOs are saying they are “ambivalent or outright dissatisfied” with their organization’s progress on AI and generative AI thus far, a recent BCG survey showed.

“CEOs are focusing on growth, CIOs are focusing on efficiency,” said Rohan Pal, chief transformation officer at ServiceNow, during a Fortune discussion this week focused on CIOs and how organizations can be digitally inclusive. “And then when you add in all the hype that exists today around generative AI, in just about every industry, it has increased the pressure on the C-suite to figure out a way to empower their organizations to use these new technologies to drive business growth.”

CEOs are bullish on their view that generative AI will improve the quality of their products, increase the intensity of competition, and significantly change their overall organization. 

But that leads to another issue. Companies are currently weighed down by a lot of technical debt. Tech debt is essentially a “tax” that companies pay to address existing technology issues, and it can account for as much as 40% of IT balance sheets, according to