The State of IT 2026
What 20 CIOs are actually doing with AI. Original research from conversations with IT leaders at Lyft, Zscaler, GitLab, Cloudflare, and more.
A report from conversations with IT leaders at:
Original Research
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70%
of IT budgets go to keeping the lights on, leaving under 30% for anything growth-focused.
50%
ticket deflection reported by IT teams that implement AI effectively.
20%
of organizations have AI fully embedded across their IT teams.
20
CIOs interviewed, including leaders at Lyft, Zscaler, GitLab, and Cloudflare.
What you'll learn
- How IT leaders are measuring AI success beyond ticket deflection
- Why most AI pilots stay localized — and how top organizations go enterprise-wide
- The organizational structures enabling AI to compound across IT teams
- What CIOs at Lyft, Zscaler, GitLab, and Cloudflare are building right now
Full report
A complete playbook for building with AI
Twenty IT leaders. One clear signal: the organizations making real progress with AI aren't treating it as a tool rollout or a cost lever. They're rebuilding how work gets done.
This report documents what that looks like in practice — from CIOs redefining what IT is responsible for, to the orgs running agentic systems that operate at a fraction of human cost.
“It is not about replacing a human, it is about elevating a human. We want to give you back time. Time to do things that maybe you haven't had time to do.”
Kevin Smith, CIO, Lyft
“If you only treat AI as a cost lever, you're going to miss the reinvention opportunity of workflows. The real upside is redesigning these workflows at 100%, eliminating handoffs, compressing the cycle times and rethinking what good looks like.”
Praniti Lakhwara, CIO, Zscaler
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