The blame for AI just landed on your desk
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Welcome to this week’s edition of CIOsurge!
This week:
Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, on why the career-changer you keep filtering out is the hire you actually need
Why 52% of tech leaders now put AI failures on the CIO, often without giving the CIO the authority to prevent them
How the CIO role is shifting from running technology to deciding where agents are allowed to run
Let’s make this week a game-changer.
Stay sharp. Stay ahead.
Hire the Career-Changer: One CISO's Case for a Wider Pipeline
I asked Roberta Anderson, CISO of Onterris, what CIOs and CISOs can actually do to build a wider hiring pipeline. Her answer was practical, and it started earlier in the funnel than most hiring conversations do.
The first move is awareness. A lot of people never enter the field because they have no idea how big it is. Everyone has seen the hacker on TV. Almost no one has seen the GRC analyst or the policy specialist.
"There's just such a wealth of opportunity in our field that people don't even know exist. So a lot of it is just getting out there and letting that knowledge be expressed so people know what is even an opportunity for them."
Roberta speaks at high schools and colleges for exactly this reason. But the part that will matter most to hiring managers in our community is what she said about the top of the funnel. Stop gatekeeping on years of experience.
The feedback she keeps hearing from the people she mentors is that they cannot get in at all, because every posting demands five or ten years. Meanwhile there are eager people with a single year of experience, or coming from an entirely different field, who never get a shot. And here is the reframe. Those different backgrounds are not deficits. They are advantages.
"Someone who has worked in healthcare understands the intricacies of the healthcare applications in HIPAA way better than anyone else. Someone coming in as a teacher understands FERPA and all this stuff within the applications way better than anyone else. A military vet really understands the security behind things and the discipline way better than anyone else."
Roberta lived this herself, moving from pre-med to the military to security. The lesson for hiring managers is to be open to the varied backgrounds of the people applying, rather than filtering them out for not having the standard resume.
The second half of the job is what happens after the hire. She pointed to the mid-career cliffs she writes about, and the fix is sponsorship. Promote your people, listen to them when promotion time comes, and help them reach the senior director and CISO roles they are aiming for.
The takeaway for technology leaders: widen the top of your funnel by recruiting career-changers and treating their prior domain as an asset, then close the loop by actively sponsoring the people you hire so they do not stall at the cliff.
CIOs bear the brunt of blame over AI mistakes
A new 8x8 survey puts a number on something a lot of us have felt coming. More than half of tech leaders, 52%, say the CIO is the one held accountable when an AI agent makes an error. That is far ahead of anyone else in the building, with customer service leadership at 16% and legal or compliance at 6%. Censuswide surveyed more than 2,500 CIOs and CTOs across the US, UK, France, Australia, and Ireland in July. The gap that should worry you is the one between accountability and control. You may not have picked the vendor, and you may not have access to its audit trail, but when the agent gets it wrong, the room turns to you.
This is the bill coming due for two years of AI showing up through the side door. Business units bought tools, teams wired agents into workflows, and nobody stopped to ask who owns the outcome when one of them acts badly. Now we know. It is you. The accountability is not going back in the box, so do not waste energy on the unfairness of it. Convert it into leverage. If you are the last line of defense, you have a clean business case for the governance, the audit access, and the single view across everything the company already bought. Take this survey into your next budget conversation. Accountability without authority is the strongest argument you will ever have for the control you have been asking for.
Now more than ever, CIOs need to be change agents
Eric Johnson, CIO at PagerDuty, argues in CIO Dive that the job has moved under our feet. The role used to center on delivering reliable infrastructure and secure systems on a predictable timetable. With AI agents now acting inside real workflows, making decisions and navigating ambiguity without a human in the loop, the CIO's work is pushing past technology deployment into something harder. Defining where an agent gets to operate on its own, and where it stays out of the business entirely, is becoming a core part of the job.
Put this next to feature one and the shape of the year gets clear. One story says you will answer for what the agents do. This one says deciding what they are even allowed to do is now your table. Same responsibility, described from two directions. The uncomfortable read is that keeping the systems up is no longer where the value of this seat lives. The value is in the judgment. Which processes can a machine run end to end, which need a human hand on them, and which should never be handed over no matter how good the agent looks in a demo. That is a business risk decision, and it is landing on the CIO because nobody else in the org is positioned to make it. Start writing those lines down now, before an incident writes them for you.
— Zack Tembi
💡 CIO Spotlights
Ram Komarraju, Chief Information Officer, Freshfields
Named CIO of Freshfields, the global law firm, as it accelerates technology, innovation, and AI as strategic drivers of client service and growth
Joins from CLS, a global financial market infrastructure group that settles roughly $8 trillion in foreign exchange payment instructions a day, owned by more than 70 major financial institutions
Most recently served as CLS managing director of technology, leading strategy, architecture, engineering, and data and analytics in a highly regulated environment
Will shape Freshfields' long-term technology, innovation, and AI strategy and lead the evolution of its global platforms
Succeeds Christopher Smith, who left the firm earlier this year
Oded Blatman, Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer, Ledger
Named CIO and CSO of Ledger, the digital asset security company, reporting directly to Chairman and CEO Pascal Gauthier
Will lead cyber and infrastructure security, product security including the Donjon, security operations, enterprise risk management, and internal IT
Joins from Fireblocks, where he spent five years as CIO and CISO building the company's global security and enterprise technology organizations through rapid international expansion
Earlier served as Global CISO of Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest bank, and as CIO and CISO of ClickSoftware, leading security through its acquisition by Salesforce
Combining the information and security roles under one leader reflects Ledger's view that the two are inseparable as tokenization and autonomous AI agents converge
