How AI is reshaping the modern IT team
As AI transforms operations, IT leaders face a new challenge: Building teams for a future that's still taking shape
Where exactly is AI revolutionizing IT operations? Try “everywhere.” Developers are leveraging AI to generate basic code, while some AI agents are resolving low-level support tickets in mere seconds and others are analyzing data to predict potential hardware failures, allowing for proactive maintenance and reduced downtime.
But AI isn’t just transforming how IT teams operate—it’s fundamentally reshaping the structure of IT teams themselves. As AI agents proliferate across enterprises while data governance becomes critical to AI success, CIOs are grappling with a pressing question: What new roles will their teams need to thrive in this AI-driven future?
The answer, according to top technology leaders, is both complex and rapidly evolving. “None of us have the skillsets we need right now,” admits Ashwin Ballal, CIO of Freshworks. “It’s not like you can just go hire the talent—there isn’t enough talent out there.”
But it’s not just hard AI skills that the modern IT team will need to leverage its potential, says Ballal. Traditional IT teams will need to adapt to the new realities of the AI age and to evolve new roles that are emerging as fast as AI itself is evolving.
The AI agent orchestra needs a conductor
No emerging IT role will be more critical than what Mark Settle, author and former CIO of Okta and BMC Software, calls “agent orchestration.” With enterprises deploying multiple AI agents across different functions, someone needs to manage this growing ecosystem.
“At the end of the day, you’ve got homegrown agents, ones from your existing vendors, and third-party marketplace solutions,” Settle explains. “Now you’ve got this ungoverned mess of things, and it’s not clear who’s going to be responsible for that.”
Ballal echoes this concern, noting that Freshworks alone operates 1,100 platforms, each potentially offering multiple AI agents. “Who is going to manage all of this?” he asks. “It has to play the role that HR used to play for employees—keeping agents within guardrails, ensuring they work well together, and preventing them from going rogue.”
And, as AI agents take on more complex IT tasks, IT workers will need to take on a more managerial role to verify the quality of their work, argues Ballal. “Previously, if you’re a software developer, the QA person was the lowest person on the rung of the ladder,” he notes. “Now in the AI age, you need a very sophisticated person who knows a lot to be able to do quality assurance on what an agent is doing.”
Extreme flexibility, extreme curiosity, and the ability to be vulnerable enough to put yourself out there and say ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to figure this out’—that’s what’s needed.
Ashwin Ballal
CIO, Freshworks
IT’s data governance imperative
Data management is cross-functional, but IT teams have always had a critical role to play in ensuring that it’s accurately collected, classified, and secured. But that’s changing as an AI-driven explosion of unstructured and synthetic data places unprecedented demands on IT workers. “We haven’t typically devoted that much effort to unstructured data in the past,” Settle observes. As a result, there are new requirements for data curation and labeling, as well as infrastructure management.
Will new IT roles be needed to meet the rising demand for proper governance and security of a tsunami of unstructured and synthetic data in coming years? Ballal predicts that, whatever the specific job titles, these IT roles will become critical, noting that “in order to get AI right, your data better be clean. Otherwise, AI amplifies garbage.”
Security teams are already taking on expanded AI data responsibilities such as data discovery for AI initiatives and governance of data used for training AI agents and LLMs. The demand is there: 82% of cybersecurity professionals say there are “visibility gaps” in finding and classifying data being ingested across the organization, leading to 60% of these roles taking on new AI responsibilities since 2024, according to a Bedrock Security report.
The skills that matter most
In 2025, searches for IT talent have become more heavily focused on AI skills, with the biggest spikes seen in prompt engineering (456% increase), AI governance (386% increase), and generative AI (289% increase), according to O’Reilly’s Technology Trends for 2025 report.
But both Ballal and Settle agree that the most critical skills for AI-era IT professionals aren’t necessarily technical. “Extreme flexibility, extreme curiosity, and the ability to be vulnerable enough to put yourself out there and say ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to figure this out’—that’s what’s needed,” Ballal stresses.
With a shortage of IT talent with AI expertise, IT leaders should cultivate these skills within their ranks, Settle advises. But in-organization training remains a critical gap. Only 39% of companies offer ongoing training for AI applications, while just 34% provide security training for AI software, according to the Freshworks report.
Taking aim at a moving target
As AI transforms the business ecosystem and the very nature of work, clearly defining new IT job roles is like shooting at a moving target, both Settle and Ballal admit.
As much as CIOs would like to craft the perfect job description, “nobody can write those requirements today,” says Ballal. Settle notes that while AI roles related to design and ethics are needed across the organization, it’s unclear where these roles should reside within the organization. Emerging roles like AI explainability specialists are critical, he argues, but they may lack “a natural home in an existing IT organization.”
For CIOs looking to build modern IT teams for the age of AI, the core issue is timing. “We’re way too early days” to define new IT roles, according to Settle. Ballal takes the long view, saying, “This is going to be a journey of evolution as we are in a revolution.”
For IT leaders, what’s inarguable is that change is needed. As AI capabilities rapidly advance, IT teams will need to embrace flexibility, creativity, and adaptability rather than rigid job descriptions, reshaping traditional roles alongside cutting-edge technological evolution.
