At Gartner CIO Leadership Forum, one message came through clearly in our conversations with CIOs and data leaders: If AI is failing, it’s because organizations lack a trusted path to production. Below are takeaways pulled directly from real conversations with CIOs: 1️⃣ “We have to tell a better business story.” The conversation is moving beyond uptime, projects, and tools. Boards want to hear revenue impact, margin protection, speed, resilience, and business outcomes. 2️⃣ “We have AI pilots, but they don’t scale.” Experimentation is happening everywhere, but without governance and operational discipline, most initiatives stall before delivering real value. 3️⃣ “The bottleneck isn’t data, it’s business logic.” Even with modern data platforms, translating business rules into repeatable, scalable workflows remains a major challenge — and too often falls back to manual workarounds. 4️⃣ “We’re balancing speed vs. control.” Organizations want to empower the business to move faster, but not at the expense of security, compliance, and trust. 5️⃣ “We can’t explain or prove AI decisions.” Without traceability, auditability, and clear lineage, AI outcomes can’t be trusted or operationalized. 6️⃣ “Our workforce needs to come along on the journey.” AI adoption isn’t just a technology shift, it’s a skills and change management challenge across the enterprise. At Alteryx, this is exactly the problem area we’re solving. We believe the conversation needs to shift away from categories and toward workflows, because that’s where governance, trust, and business value come together. So we’re investing in 3 specific areas: ️➡️ A governed workflow platform Empowering business users to move at the speed of the business, while ensuring IT has full visibility, control, and auditability. ➡️ Seamless access to trusted data Connecting to modern data platforms so teams can work with the right data, in the right context, without introducing fragmentation. ➡️ Governed AI workflows Combining AI with deterministic business logic so outcomes are explainable, repeatable, and production-ready — not a black box. The takeaway we’re seeing across the market: AI reaches production when the business trusts the outcome, and IT trusts how it was built. Leading organizations aren’t conducting endless pilots; they’re operationalizing AI with: ✔️ Trusted, governed data ✔️ Transparent business logic ✔️ Audit-ready workflows ✔️ Measurable, defensible outcomes We’re excited by the conversations happening with CIOs who are leaning into this shift, and we’re committed to helping them turn AI from experimentation into real operating capability. #GartnerCIO #GartnerIT #CIO
