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.
Insights contributed from
Lyft
Zscaler
GitLab
Cloudflare
Nextdoor
Rubrik
Cursor
Zip
Palo Alto Networks
IMC LogisticsOriginal 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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