Ask a Fortune 500 Europe technology chief what they actually do in 2026 and the answer rarely lines up with the org chart. They are running infrastructure, but at the same time are also drafting board papers on regulatory exposure, briefing audit committees, developing cybersecurity strategies and more. ‘CIO’, ‘CTO’ and ‘CISO’ remain the formal titles common at Fortune 500 companies, but the roles behind them are among the most consequential and least defined in the European C-Suite.
“It’s a bit like the Wild West,” says Anna Thomas, co-founder and director of the Institute for the Future of Work. “There is a lot of nervousness [for tech leaders] about doing it right, about compliance, about changes of law, about what’s in their domain and what’s not in their domain,” she says. Emma Smith, who’s been CISO at Vodafone since 2015, describes the same uncertainty from within the role. The founding priorities of the job–baseline security, knowing the business and the people–“haven’t changed.” The context, however, has changed. “Cyber risk, for example, is volatile and requires constant management,” she says. “There is no finish line.”
Conversations with technology leaders and researchers across Europe point to a role reshaped by AI–and to real gaps in skills and pipeline that have come with it. The picture that emerges is of a job that has outgrown its title–and a generation of leaders writing the blueprint as they go.
Senior technology roles inside large companies are being reshaped as companies are giving them more responsibility for business strategy. At the 124-year-old Danish shipping company, Maersk, Navneet Kapoor’s title changed from chief transformation officer to chief technology and information officer–a deliberate move. “I don’t break these roles, because then it really creates more silos and handoffs,” he says. “I want end-to-end accountability.” Two years ago, his seat was lifted onto Maersk’s executive board–a signal, he states, that the company decided that “technology is a key driver for the success of the company and strategy, not just a functional role.”
“No management team has ever presided over the broad-based implementation of a general-purpose technology before, because the last one was alternating current 140 years ago”
Not every company is responding in the same way. Some are keeping the traditional separation between technology, cybersecurity and information roles, while others are combining functions as data becomes more central to strategy. Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense, the cybersecurity arm of the Orange Group, confirms the more conventional split as CIO, CISO and CTO remain three distinct seats at the company. At Vodafone, Smith has held the CISO role for almost 11 years, a tenure that has typically had “short mortality,” according to Kapoor.
Similarly, Danone’s chief information and data officer, Erwin Logt, says IT and data were separate functions when he joined the company six years ago, and have since been merged and elevated. Today, he describes himself as a “business leader with a passion for tech and data”, whereas six years ago, he was a “tech leader.”
AI is putting new pressure on technology leaders because it is no longer being treated as a narrow IT upgrade. It’s becoming a company-wide management challenge that touches strategy, operations, governance, risk, and workforce planning.
Joseph Fuller, the Harvard Business School professor who co-founded the school’s Managing the Future of Work project, states that AI is not an information technology but a general-purpose technology. “No management team has ever presided over the broad-based implementation of a general-purpose technology before, because the last one was alternating current 140 years ago.” As a result, today’s technology leaders are being asked to manage a scope and scale of responsibility far beyond what they could in the past.
“…the execution is lagging the awareness”
The pace of AI transformation is moving faster than business leaders anticipated, and Fuller is blunt about where the responsibility sits. Treating AI as a technology problem rather than a whole company one is “a dereliction of duty” by chief executives. For tech leaders in Europe today, it’s no longer just about building and scaling products; it’s also about keeping AI-driven systems at the forefront.
“Cyber risk, for example, is volatile and requires constant management. There is no finish line.”
But the gap is not only technical. Thomas argues the most overlooked skill is socio-technical–understanding how technology actually lands with workflows and processes and with the people using them. “They need to be really integrated, working closely with other domains, and to have some kind of socio-technical readiness, so they’re thinking not just about technology and technology adoption but impacts,” she says.
Foulon says Orange Cyberdefense is still actively hiring, bringing on 500 to 600 people a year, with a particular focus on younger talent. “Thanks to AI, we automate much more than before, so we will need [fewer] people…on the other hand, we need [younger] people to transform our processes, to innovate, and to think about the next wave,” he says.
Greverie sees AI and tech development as accelerants for the next generation of technology talent. Similarly, Danone’s Logt frames AI as “complementing rather than replacing” entry-level work, comparing the current AI wave to the rise of the internet, where workers who failed to adapt and leverage new technologies in their jobs struggled to keep pace. He suggests AI will similarly become an essential workplace tool with significant implications for entry-level roles.
Senior leaders emphasize the development of tech and AI at the bottom of the org chart. At some companies, however, the top is being rewritten by the corporate reflex to put a new title on every shift. “Every time something new and unexpected happens at a company, we create a CXO,” says Fuller, which reinforces the creation of this ‘Tower of Babel’ phenomenon. The companies that get this right, he argues, will be the ones that accept “all the main processes the company will be reconfigured around AI.”
The blueprint for the tech leader role in 2026 does not yet exist. It’s being rewritten in real time under the pressures of regulatory deadlines, the AI wave, and a workforce reshaping itself at both ends. The leaders who succeed will be the ones who acknowledge that the job has outgrown its title, and the boards that succeed will be the ones that stop assuming the job description on file still matches the job–and start building the structures, pipeline, and executive support the role now demands.
