In this conversation featuring Dr. Diana Cano, CIO at Cambium Learning Group and Rishi Kaushal, CIO at Entrust, the team at CIO Influence discusses the changing scope of the modern day B2B CIO’s role.
What is the Chief Change Officer’s full scope of responsibilities? Why is facilitating organization-wide adoption the most vital to shepherd innovation?
Rishi: Today’s CIO wears so many hats that the role increasingly spans responsibilities once distributed across multiple members of the C-suite. In addition to running IT operations, we’re responsible for connecting technology decisions with business strategy, risk management, workforce readiness, governance, and measurable outcomes. AI has accelerated this shift by requiring CIOs to ensure responsible adoption, demonstrate ROI, and maintain trust with employees and customers alongside deployment.
Facilitating organization-wide adoption of tech is an essential part of the CIO role, especially in the age of AI. As implementation surges, true transformation requires employees to understand how to use AI effectively, leaders to have confidence in the governance behind each system, and teams to be able to connect usage to meaningful business outcomes. That requires AI literacy across the organization, not just technical expertise. Today’s CIOs are uniquely positioned to bridge business priorities, technical complexity, and enterprise risk, helping organizations innovate while maintaining accountability and trust.
Dr. Cano: The CIO role has expanded well beyond technology implementation. We’re responsible for helping our organizations navigate change – bringing together business leaders, technology teams, and end users. Unlike past technology shifts, AI affects almost every team and workflow. Helping an organization understand where AI fits, how it should be used, and what success looks like with adoption is one of the CIO’s most important responsibilities. We can’t outsource it to a transformation office or consulting partner – the executive team needs to come together to move the whole organization forward in the time of change, with the CIO as captain of that team. If employees aren’t properly equipped to use it confidently and leaders aren’t aligned on how it’ll drive business results, even the best technology won’t deliver meaningful ROI. The CIO’s role is to bridge that gap so that innovation can turn into business impact.
How can cross-industry knowledge provide CIOs with a broader, necessary perspective on leading through change?
Dr. Cano: Some of the best ideas come from seeing how another industry or company approached a challenge and adapting those lessons within your own environment. While every organization has its own set of priorities and constraints, we’re all ultimately thinking through many of the same questions regarding AI adoption, workforce readiness, and organizational change. Engaging with peers outside your industry and transferring your learnings to your organization help you excel as a leader. Leading through change is less about finding the perfect technology solution and more about building the culture, processes, and partnerships that help employees embrace it.
Rishi: Every industry approaches transformation from a different starting point, but the underlying challenges are remarkably similar when it comes to AI. Whether in financial services, education, healthcare, or cybersecurity, all CIOs are balancing innovation with security, regulatory requirements, operational resilience, and workforce adoption. Looking beyond their own industry allows CIOs to learn from organizations solving similar governance, identity, and modernization challenges in unique ways and apply proven approaches instead of solving every problem from scratch.
The pace of AI innovation also means no organization can operate in isolation. Sharing lessons across industries helps leaders anticipate challenges earlier, build stronger governance models, and create more resilient foundations for long-term transformation.
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Why does successful AI adoption depend on modernizing legacy systems, building AI-ready data foundations, and gaining visibility into technical debt?
Rishi: As AI becomes more operational, the limits of legacy environments are becoming difficult to ignore. The reality is that these older systems were never designed to support autonomous systems, real-time decision-making, or large-scale automation. Modern APIs, high-quality data, and clear visibility into existing infrastructure are vital to ensure AI can operate reliably and securely. Without these foundations, organizations struggle to govern AI, integrate new capabilities, or measure business outcomes.
It’s also important to recognize that AI alone doesn’t improve broken processes. Automating an inefficient workflow simply allows it to fail faster and at greater scale. Organizations should first redesign processes around the outcome they’re trying to achieve, then apply AI where it creates measurable value. That approach also makes it easier to identify technical debt, reduce complexity, and build systems that can adapt as AI continues to evolve.
Dr. Cano: Organizations are understandably excited about what AI can do for them, but it’s hard to move quickly if the underlying technology isn’t ready to support it. Data must be reliable and accessible, systems must work together, and leaders need a solid understanding of where obstacles lie in their stack – so addressing the issues that matter in your tech debt is a great area of focus for CIOs. Those foundational data and systems assets may not be the most visible part of an AI strategy, but they’re what make innovation possible and what drives true value for your customers. Taking the time to strengthen that foundation gives organizations the flexibility to build new capabilities efficiently, rather than working around legacy limitations.
How can CIOs guide AI-driven transformation while maintaining security, compliance, accountability, and trust?
Dr. Cano: Innovation moves at a faster pace when people trust the processes behind it. For CIOs, this means close collaboration across the enterprise to establish clear expectations around how AI is used, how decisions are made, and how sensitive information is protected. In EdTech, we value the trust our educators, students, and families have in us and develop solutions that create real value in teaching and learning. AI can empower students with agency, inform educators with insights, and build a learning framework every family can support. Security, governance, and compliance can’t be treated as “checkpoints” after implementation; they must be built into every step of the process. When organizations lead with governance, guidance, transparency, and accountability, they’re better positioned to adopt AI with confidence and sustain that progress over time.
Rishi: Trust is ultimately what determines whether AI scales successfully. Customers, employees, and regulators need confidence that AI systems are transparent, governed, and aligned with business objectives.
Building that trust starts with governance. Organizations need clear policies around identity, access, accountability, and oversight for both human users and AI agents. As AI becomes more autonomous, non-human identities will require the same governance principles we’ve long applied to people, including least-privilege access, lifecycle management, and continuous monitoring. At the same time, human oversight remains essential for high-impact decisions where accountability cannot be delegated to AI alone.
CIOs play a critical role in turning those governance principles into business confidence. By connecting technical implementation with enterprise risk management, they help organizations adopt AI in a way that strengthens security, supports compliance, and builds the trust needed to drive lasting transformation.
About Rishi Kaushal:
Rishi Kaushal is the Chief Information Officer at Entrust. Leveraging over 20 years of experience in IT, Rishi has been instrumental in pioneering the organization’s corporate IT division, M&A integration, cloud migration, and digital transformation initiatives. Prior to joining Entrust in 2019, Rishi held various leadership roles in IT business operations, program management, and software development at HID Global, Toshiba America, and DAZ Systems (now part of Accenture).
About Dr. Diana Cano:
Dr. Diana Cano brings over two decades of expertise in educational technology to her role as Chief Information Officer at Cambium Learning Group. She oversees the strategic direction of IT services, information security and innovations, ensuring robust infrastructure and system integrity across all of Cambium’s operations. Diana holds a Ph.D. in Education from Rutgers University, an MS in Technology Management from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University.
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