CIOs confront AI’s double edged sword: Leadership and accountability

Jay Kiew, CEO of Citizencentric, addresses the CIO Peer Forum in Ottawa. – Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

The following is an excerpt from the latest feature from the Digital Journal titled CIOs confront AI’s double edged sword: Leadership and accountability, which you can read in full here.

“We are all the two-faced gods of our businesses,” said Gaetano Mazzuca.

“Because as CIOs… one is to secure, keep, archive, stable, control… but on the other side, we’re transforming. We’re deviating. We’re changing. We’re asked to mature,” .

Mazzuca, CIO at the City of Red Deer, shared this with the crowd at the CIO Association of Canada’s Peer Forum. Drawn from Roman mythology, the metaphor framed the day’s central contradiction: CIOs are charged with managing risk and reliability while simultaneously driving disruptive transformation.

That tension shaped day two of the event, where sessions focused not on whether AI is coming, but how to lead through it. From governance to trust, data to culture, Canadian IT leaders outlined what it means to guide organizations in a moment of accelerating complexity.

As the national media partner for CIOCAN, Digital Journal followed the conversations to understand what Canada’s IT leaders are learning and what they’re being asked to become.

Across sectors, it was clear that the role of the CIO is evolving again. And this shift will be shaped not by what tools they choose, but by how well they help others make sense of what’s happening.

The human work is the hard work

Several sessions emphasized that building confidence in AI starts with how leaders frame the change. Change, after all, is no longer something that can be neatly managed.

If AI requires clean data, it also requires trust, and trust isn’t built by policy alone. It’s shaped by how leaders frame change, and how teams are invited to participate in it.

“You can’t manage what you can’t predict,” said Jay Kiew, CEO of Citizencentric. “Change shouldn’t be managed. It’s something we need to become fluent in.”

That fluency includes how we talk about AI inside organizations.