The hardest seat at the table
From the cloud to Covid to AI, IT has absorbed the shock, rewritten the playbook, and quietly taught the rest of the business how to change
Ryan Ferguson was in a Salt Lake City hotel room, preparing for a weekly meeting with his remote team, when the call came in from his vice president telling him to cancel his return flight. Don’t come back to the office, she said. No one’s coming back to the office.
It was early March 2020. At the time, Ferguson was an Agile/DevOps consultant working with a major U.S. bank.
“We thought the lockdown would last two weeks,” he says. “It turned into two years.”
Virtually overnight, the bank’s IT team was tasked with reinventing the company—converting more than 60,000 employees to remote workers, transforming not only fundamental business processes but also the culture of the entire organization. Ferguson says they did it by applying the fundamentals of the agile manifesto: put the needs of the company’s people first, and deploy processes and tools in service of the people.
“The pandemic was a ‘yes-and’ moment for IT,” says Ferguson, who is now VP of IT operations for iQor, an international business process outsourcing firm. “How do you handle a 4x spike in remote traffic and infrastructure without disrupting the business? We used the culture and values of the technology department to help the rest of the business adapt.”
During that chaotic period, IT’s job morphed from keeping the lights on to keeping the business alive. Yet the pandemic is not the only time tech teams have been asked to perform above and beyond. From the earliest days of the internet integration through BYOD (bring your own device) and shadow IT, the rise of the cloud and SaaS, digital transformation and enterprise service management, the role of technology leader has always been the hardest seat at the table. With each paradigm shift, IT leaders have taken on a greater role in formulating the long-term strategy of the business.
Now, with corporate mandates driving the adoption of agentic AI and digital workers, that role is shifting yet again. According to the National Center for the Middle Market, mid-market businesses are pouring 28% of their investment dollars into AI. Nearly 82% of midmarket companies have AI in production, though so far only 1 in 4 have scaled it company-wide. As IT leaders’ responsibilities have steadily increased, so has their role in driving the organization forward, says Freshworks CIO Ashwin Ballal.
“IT is no longer your old-school reactive help desk,” he says. “At Freshworks, I’m not just the IT operator, I’m customer zero. I help product and engineering drive their roadmap, sales develop their go-to-market strategy, pricing figure out how customers will respond. And today, who better than our own IT organization to drive AI strategy?”
From BYOD to bring your own bot
Ballal still remembers what he calls “the iPad moment,” when consumer technology and enterprise IT converged. When Apple introduced its first tablet in 2010, Ballal was CIO for a semi-conductor manufacturer.
“I handed this device to our CEO and said, ‘The iPad is going to change our company forever,'” Ballal says. “That elevated the CIO’s brand immensely by establishing IT as true enablers of the business.”
Later that year, when the company gave tablet PCs to all 5,000 of its employees, Ballal’s team outfitted each of them with one of the first mobile device management apps, helping to bring BYOD out of the shadows and into mainstream enterprise.
Today, instead of BYOD, IT departments are grappling with BYOB: bring your own bot. A recent Freshworks survey found that unsanctioned or “shadow” AI is common in more than 70% of midsize companies. Yet only a third of these firms say they have a rigorous AI governance framework in place; roughly half have the beginnings of one.
While AI is already enhancing how teams deliver services, it’s also piling even more work onto IT’s already crowded plate. According to Freshworks’ 2026 Global Cost of Complexity report, nearly 9 out of 10 mid-market tech leaders say managing AI has increased their team's workload, while 8 out of 10 report that AI is introducing noise or errors into their work product.
“It’s no coincidence we went from shadow IT to shadow cloud to shadow AI,” says Stephen Mann, principal analyst and content director for ITSM.tools. “Motivated and creative people are always going to find their own capabilities. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does put more pressure on IT to establish the necessary guardrails and to govern AI in a way that’s positive, not negative.”
From delivering services to transforming the business
In the mid-to-late 2000s, companies began to understand that the same processes and workflows used to fix broken laptops or reset employee passwords could also be used to deliver other business services, such as onboarding new hires or booking meeting rooms, notes Mann. They also understood that using cloud and SaaS platforms for service delivery could work better and cost less than hosting these systems on prem.
As cloud and SaaS matured, ITSM became a proving ground for cloud adoption within businesses, Mann says. ITSM also raised the bar for what organizations could expect from IT departments, facilitating the adoption of enterprise service management platforms and driving digital transformation. The pandemic accelerated this evolution, forcing organizations to deliver more services digitally while also focusing more attention on the employee experience.
Now AI is accelerating it again, says Mann.
“I used to say that ITSM was a slow tanker to turn,” he says. “That view died when ChatGPT came on the scene.”
The challenge now for IT departments is to resist pressure from top management to implement too much AI too quickly, or to use it to improve things IT is already good at, he warns.
“If you’re just using AI to do the same things faster or more efficiently, you’ll likely end up spending a lot of money without delivering anything truly valuable,” says Mann. “IT’s job is to help the business use AI to do things it can’t currently do.”
From managing systems to governing processes
“There has been a seismic shift in the way IT operates,” says John Burns, a senior director of financial systems and controls at healthcare provider Summit BHC.
Over the course of his career, he’s watched IT move from modernizing on-premises ERP and ERM systems to adopting cloud and SaaS finance solutions and automating accounts payable services using AI. The real change, he says, is that IT has evolved from ticket management to service orchestration, and from selecting the systems the business runs on to governing systems chosen by others.
“In the past, IT would pick out and implement software to run the business,” Burns says. “Today the business side is choosing the systems and asking IT to integrate them into their current footprint. That just adds more to IT’s plate, because they have to understand what’s going on at the ground level in every business unit, whether that’s HR, finance, legal, or operations.”
The hardest part in each of these shifts wasn’t the technology, he adds. It was getting finance leaders to trust a system they no longer controlled, and tying every IT project to a measurable outcome while ensuring the right controls were in place.
“The lessons for AI are the same,” he adds. “Prove the work before you hand over the keys. Start with small pilots, measurable results, and controls baked in from day one. Bring the same discipline to agentic AI as you would to any other modernization project.”
From facilitating change to leading the charge
The emergence of AI agents will put new pressure on both IT teams and business personnel, says Ballal. The CIO job may begin to look more like “head of digital HR,” for example, as IT leaders manage corps of agentic workers, each of whom needs their own identity, access privileges, and performance reviews. At the same time, department heads across each company will need to re-imagine what their traditional processes will look like in an agentic world.
“Human workflows won’t necessarily work for agents,” he adds. “If you just mimic those, you’re not going to get the right output.”
Organizations that already have a good understanding of their internal workflows will enjoy a huge advantage when it comes to automating them, says Burns.
“You need to make sure everyone’s doing the same things in the same ways, and that those processes are well documented,” he says. “Otherwise, all you’re going to do is scale chaos quicker.”
And while earlier paradigm shifts offer valuable lessons, the move to agentic will present its own unique challenges—with IT on the front lines to help blaze the trail.
“CEOs will lay out the strategy,” Ferguson says. “The operations team will dictate how to deliver value for customers. But it’s technology that’s charting the course for the business. It’s on my team at iQor to say, ‘Here’s this new technology called AI, here’s what it does and doesn’t do, here are the pitfalls.’ If we can’t educate the business on how to use this technology, we’ll lose out to a competitor who can. Our business is built on the backs of the success or failure of my team.”
