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5 priorities for Australian CIOs in 2025
- Evolving market and technology changes are making the CIOs job more complex
- Five priorities for CIOs offer interconnected opportunities to multiply business value
- Sustainable technology choices required to align with regulatory expectations and environmental goals
As Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in Australia step into 2025, they're navigating a landscape rich with both familiar terrain and unexplored territory. Their north star remains constant: creating business value through technology. However, market and technology changes have made it more complex. To succeed, we believe technology leaders would benefit from focusing on five key priorities: integrating AI, fortifying digital resilience, making technology sustainable, accessing the right skills, and making every dollar count. These priorities don't exist in isolation – they're deeply intertwined, offering CIOs unique opportunities to multiply value creation across the organisation.
Priority 1: Integrate AI to transform your business
From GenAIs explosive debut in 2023, to tentative adoption in Australia in 2024, 2025 is the year to embed AI deeply across the enterprise. The business case is compelling – 40% of Australian CEOs anticipate GenAI will boost profitability within 12 months, and 88% view AI as crucial to their strategic success over the next three to five years. However, with only 36% of businesses operating mature AI practices, there's significant untapped potential.1
While trust remains a key concern, organisations that combine robust strategy, strong data foundations, lean governance, skilled teams, ethical frameworks, and effective change management will lead this transformation.
What to do:
Focus AI investments. Track ROI closely and scale smart – you want solutions that grow with you without breaking the bank.
Find the right human-AI balance. Automation is powerful, but the real wins come from combining human expertise with AI capabilities.
Establish lightweight governance. Create practical guardrails around ethics and compliance that enable rather than hamper innovation.
Ask yourself:
How can your governance enable rather than restrict innovation?
What's your next big move in maturing AI practices?
Where are you seeing real returns on AI, and where can you optimise?
Explore more:
Is your technology operating model ready for GenAI?
Priority 2: Be digitally resilient
Digital resilience has never been more critical. Australian and New Zealand CIOs are boosting cybersecurity budgets by 33% – and with good reason.2 Over 1,100 incidents – from threats like AI-powered social engineering to sophisticated deepfakes – were reported to the Australian Signals Directorate in 2023 alone.3 These have caught CEOs' attention, with 64% now rating their companies as moderately to highly exposed to cyber risks. Add in IT-OT convergence challenges and ongoing cloud security concerns, and the urgency is clear.
What to do:
Streamline your technology stack. Fewer systems mean fewer vulnerabilities across your organisation and partner ecosystem.
Strengthen your recovery playbook. Build in redundancy where it counts – because bouncing back quickly, matters.
Upgrade your security fundamentals. Advanced endpoint protection, zero trust, and disinformation defence should be top of mind.
Start thinking quantum. While quantum computing threats aren't immediate, getting ahead of post-quantum cryptography puts you in a strong position.
Ask yourself:
How quickly could you recover from a major cyber incident?
Are your defences evolving as fast as the threats?
Where do you need to focus security investments now?
Explore more:
28th Annual Global CEO Survey – Australian insights
Digital Trust Insights Survey 2025
Priority 3: Make technology sustainable
Sustainability is no longer a buzzword; it’s a business mandate now that sustainability reporting has been passed into law in Australia. With Australian data centres consuming 5% of national energy4 and AI workloads growing hungrier, the pressure to reduce emissions is intensifying. Sustainable IT is about reimagining how we use all resources across our technology portfolio, creating leaner operations that ultimately boost both environmental and financial performance.
What to do:
Get your reporting right. Master National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme (NGERS) and Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRSs) requirements and build clear visibility of your environmental impact.
Make tech choices count. Think energy-efficient data centres, smart cooling and strategic cloud use. Be selective with GenAI – focus on high-impact use cases.
Look at the full picture. From supplier choices to hardware efficiency and recycling – every decision matters.
Share your progress. Good environmental stories boost both team engagement and market reputation.
Ask yourself:
What innovative ways can you reduce your tech footprint?
How ready are you for evolving environmental regulations?
Where can you measure and improve environmental impact today?
Explore more:
Up your technology game for Australia’s new Sustainability Reporting Standards
PwC’s 28th Annual Global CEO Survey
Some of Australia’s leading CEOs are taking bold steps to reinvent their business models. For everyone else, there exists a stark choice: self-disrupt or be disrupted.
Contact the authors
Matt Benwell
Partner, Digital Strategy and Transformation, PwC Australia
Claire McKenna-Blake
Partner, PwC Australia
Hester Bax
Senior Manager, Modern Digital Enterprise Tech Advisory, PwC Australia
References
- https://www.fifthquadrant.com.au/content/uploads/Australian-Responsible-AI-Index-2024-Full-Report.pdf
- https://www.gartner.com.au/en/information-technology/insights/cio-agenda-an-australia-and-new-zealand-perspective
- https://www.cyber.gov.au/about-us/view-all-content/reports-and-statistics/annual-cyber-threat-report-2023-2024?
- https://www.morganstanley.com.au/events-programs/australia-summit/powering-the-growth-of-genai
- https://www.acs.org.au/campaign/digital-pulse.html
- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/ai-at-work-is-here-now-comes-the-hard-part
- https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-09-10-gartner-survey-reveals-cybersecurity-remains-top-investment-for-australian-and-new-zealand-cios-in-2025
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