The new CIO mandate 2026: Agency AI and data

The global technology landscape has just gained a new direction with the release of the McKinsey Global Tech Agenda 2026 . The message for technology leaders is unequivocal: the era of incremental modernization is over. We are entering the "rewiring" phase, a profound restructuring of companies around intelligence.

However, a central paradox dominates C-level discussions this year. While Agency AI emerges as the most promising growth engine for 2026, the foundation that supports it remains fragile. According to McKinsey research with over 600 leaders, 1 in 4 high-performing companies admit they still lack the necessary data foundation to scale AI safely and reliably .

For companies seeking growth above 10% per year, this is not just a technical detail; it's the biggest strategic bottleneck of the decade.

Technology is strategy: the end of the IT sector as a cost center

Historically, the technology department was seen as an operational support function. The 2026 report shows that, in leading companies, the center of gravity has definitively shifted from a cost center to a value creator.

top-performing organizations , nearly two-thirds of technology leaders are "very involved" in crafting corporate strategy. Moreover, strategy is no longer a static document reviewed annually. About half of high-performing companies now engage in interactive co-creation between business and technology throughout the year.

This cultural shift requires the CIO to act as a strategy architect, redesigning the company to operate with intelligence embedded in every process.

Read also: The 9 Gartner trends that will define technology in 2026

The emergence of agentic AI and the "Intelligence layer"

If 2024 and 2025 were marked by experimentation with Generative AI, 2026 belongs to Agentive AI . Unlike traditional chatbots, agentive systems plan, decide, and act autonomously through complex workflows.

To support this autonomy, McKinsey points to the need for an "intelligence layer" : a unified set of data, AI models, and decision systems that serve as the company's control blueprint.

The role of Skyone Studio in building this layer

This is precisely where the data foundation becomes the competitive differentiator. Skyone Studio was designed to materialize this layer of intelligence, eliminating silos and organizing information from diverse sources to enable complex AI projects.

Through an architecture that integrates iPaaS , Lakehouse , and AI Agents , Skyone Studio ensures that technology is not a barrier to scale.

• Unified Integration (iPaaS): centralizes data from over 400 systems (such as SAP B1, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot), ensuring that AI agents have access to a 360º view of the operation.
• Scalable Lakehouse: delivers the performance needed for optimized queries and analysis of unstructured data, essential for training private models.
• Agent orchestration: allows the development of agents that understand objectives, plan actions, and execute individual or multi-agent tasks.

The challenge for foundations: why ambition doesn't replace infrastructure?

Many CIOs are investing in AI, but few are investing in the right infrastructure. The McKinsey report highlights that AI investment has already surpassed cybersecurity and infrastructure modernization as the top priority for the next two years.

However, a common mistake is trying to "camouflage" AI on a fragmented database. Around 31% of leaders cite a lack of talent or capabilities , and 29% mention integration complexity as the main obstacles to adopting agentic AI.

The lesson is clear: technology with speed, not just efficiency, is what will drive growth . To achieve this, it's necessary to replace annual budget planning with more agile practices, such as product and platform models.

Data strategy as the foundation

In the Skyone Studio ecosystem, data strategy is treated as the critical first step. Organizing and understanding available data is essential for applying effective AI models. Without this organization, the risks of "hallucinations" and security breaches increase dramatically.

Skyone Studio makes this journey easier by offering tools to:

1. Collection and centralization: uniting data from APIs, files, and legacy systems.
2. Enrichment: enhancing information with additional context to generate actionable insights.
3. Governance: monitoring access control and data integrity, ensuring that AI operates within compliance parameters.

The 4 Empresses in the CIO's Playbook for 2026

For CIOs who want to lead digital transformation and sustain the growth promised by AI, McKinsey defines four strategic imperatives that must be adopted immediately:

1. Putting technology at the heart of the strategy: the CIO should be the CEO's direct partner in innovating business models.
2. Continuously co-create: replace annual decision cycles with continuous reviews (such as quarterly business-technology reviews).
3. Using AI to drive innovation: focusing on Generative AI to increase productivity and free up teams for creative activities.
4. Restructuring the business around AI: adopting capability-based operating models, where success comes from "spending better," not just "spending more."

The future is resource-driven and capabilities-based

One intriguing finding from the Global Tech Agenda 2026 is the shift in talent management. While lower-performing companies still rely heavily on outsourcing (40% plan to increase outsourcing ), leading companies are going the opposite way.

About half of the top performers plan to increase insourcing to bring strategic technological expertise back in-house. They understood that outsourcing builds temporary capacity, but insourcing builds transformative capacity .

By using platforms like Skyone Studio, these internal teams gain a "superpower." With pre-built templates and customizable workflows, implementation time is reduced, allowing internal talent to focus on what really matters: generating value for the end customer.

Conclusion: Is your company ready for 2026?

The future belongs to the companies that build the right infrastructure today. The ambition to adopt agentic AI will only yield results if there is a solid data foundation and seamless integration between systems.

As the McKinsey report points out, success doesn't come from having the most expensive tools, but from managing technological investment as a system that connects people, data, and strategy.

At Skyone, we believe that the cloud and data are the connectors of this future. With Skyone Studio, we eliminate silos and simplify the AI ​​journey so that your business isn't the "1 in 4" left behind due to a lack of foundation.

Is your infrastructure ready for the 2026 term?

Written by Skyone