Demonstrating ROI-led AI leadership accelerates the path to CTO
AI isn’t a magic button you press to create business value. It’s a tool. And like any tool, it’s only valuable if people know how to use it, and have a reason to. That’s what makes AI leadership so critical in today’s enterprise environment.
Most companies run AI pilots, but few put them into production. It’s a problem. According to the MIT State of AI in Business report, 95% of organizations say they’re getting zero return from their AI investments. That figure should make leadership pause. What’s missing isn’t intelligence, it’s execution.
As a devops leader or technical manager with ambition, you have an opportunity here. You’re often close to systems, architecture, and delivery. That means you’re also close to the leverage points where AI can actually make a difference. When you find one, don’t just experiment, lead. Align AI initiatives with a real business problem. Define the outcome. Deliver production-ready tools, not prototypes. Track the business impact. Then share how you made it work.
The C-suite doesn’t need more demos. They want results that scale. If you can generate those consistently, especially in a space where others are stuck, you’re not just being useful. You’re becoming essential. That’s where the shift towards CTO begins.
Establishing actionable standards for AI integration reveals leadership capability
You can’t scale AI in real teams without rules. Tools are spreading fast, AI coding assistants, story generators, documentation bots, but without structure, you get chaos. Good devops leaders understand this early. Great ones do something about it.
If you want to stand out, don’t just use the tools. Set the standards. Define when vibe coding makes sense, and when it doesn’t. Guide your teams on how to get valid, testable output from AI code generators. Lay the groundwork for AI to help with documentation, observability, even technical testing. Don’t drift into experimentation for experimentation’s sake. Make it operational.
Establishing common expectations, around security, testing, resilience, isn’t bureaucracy. It’s what makes technology reliable. When your teammates adopt your AI practices because they make their lives easier and the architecture stronger, leadership will notice. You’re driving clarity in a noisy space.
The best engineers are already blending their technical depth with communication and mentoring. They’re not just coding, they’re helping others ship faster and safer. As Rukmini Reddy, SVP of Engineering at PagerDuty, put it: “The most relevant engineers will be the ones who treat AI as a collaborator and leadership as a craft.” That’s not soft advice, it’s straight feedback from senior engineering leadership.
If you’re looking to move toward CTO, become the person who writes the rules others choose to follow. That’s not about controlling innovation. It’s how you make innovation repeatable.
Building desirable, scalable platforms positions DevOps engineers for leadership recognition
Most leadership paths don’t begin with a big announcement. They start when others choose to follow your work because it makes their own better. That’s what happens when you build platforms people actually want to use.
For devops professionals aiming for leadership, this means shifting focus. It’s not about closing your ticket faster than your peers. It’s about building something that improves how your team, and the teams around you, operate. If that platform helps them deploy quicker, test more reliably, and work with less friction, then you’ve got their attention. When it scales, you’ve got leadership’s attention.
Self-service tools, standard pipelines, and reusable components reduce dependency during growth. That’s valuable. If you’re improving developer experience, driving shift-left security, or hardening continuous testing, make sure you’re tracking outcomes, adoption, velocity gains, reduction in exception handling. Without metrics, your impact is invisible. With them, it’s undeniable.
Engineering leaders rarely promote people based on output alone. They look for people who inspire adoption, simplify complexity, and scale quality. That’s what modern platform engineering offers. If you’re doing that well, act like a leader now, because people have already started to see you as one.
Shifting from tactical executor to strategic planner is essential for advancing to CTO
You can’t lead enterprise strategy while thinking only in stories and sprints. At some point, moving toward the CTO track means lifting your perspective, and helping others do the same.
When you’re solving tactical issues, performance bottlenecks, broken builds, it’s useful, but short-term. CTOs operate differently. They prioritize architecture, governance, and future scalability. They make decisions that hold up not only across quarters but across market shifts, customer growth, and regulatory change.
This requires stepping away from the comfort of speed. You’ll need to slow down when it counts, evaluate platform expansion prospects, assess change management costs, and adapt systems for tool integration. Then communicate that view to others. Influence, without owning every detail, is part of the job.
Martin Davis, Managing Partner at Dunelm Associates, explains this transition well: “There are rarely right and wrong answers, and technology changes fast, so be pragmatic and be prepared to abandon previous decisions as circumstances change.” That’s not vague. It’s strategic flexibility.
If you’re in devops now, start taking stock of the platforms and technologies your company uses. Ask how they’ll scale, integrate, and evolve. Start facilitating those discussions. The shift from reacting to guiding, that’s what defines readiness for a CTO role.
Developing data management and governance expertise is a key differentiator
Data is foundational. Without high-quality, well-managed data, every AI model, dashboard, or real-time system you’re building is at risk of delivering misleading outcomes, and wasting resources. That’s not a technology issue. That’s a leadership issue.
Most devops professionals already work close to data pipelines and infrastructure, monitoring, automating, deploying. But stepping toward CTO requires going deeper. Understand how data is collected, structured, validated, and governed. Get involved in dataops efforts. Learn how data lineage is tracked. Know where your models get training data from and what regulatory risks could emerge if those sources are compromised or outdated.
Few tech leaders have real hands-on experience in this space. That’s a gap and an opportunity. The organizations that succeed with large-scale AI won’t just be building better models, they’ll be governing better data. Clean data enables trusted outputs. If AI experiences are inconsistent, it often traces back to poor preparation at the data layer.
Camden Swita, Head of AI and ML at New Relic, put this directly: “It’s one thing for a human to recognize poor data and work around it, but AI agents are still not great at it, and using poor or outdated data will lead to undesirable outcomes.” He’s right. Systems can’t compensate for bad inputs. You either solve it, or you ship unreliable features.
CTOs with data governance fluency can shift their organizations from reactive to proactive on compliance, trust, and innovation. That’s a skill set worth investing in now.
Expanding expertise across diverse disciplines is critical for CTO candidacy
Strong CTOs don’t just go deep. They go wide. Product, infrastructure, security, architecture, operations, they understand how decisions in one area cascade across all the others. If you’re serious about reaching CTO level, you need to stop specializing in one vertical and start connecting dots across the enterprise.
Focus is important in your early tech career, but at a certain level, it limits your growth. Devops engineers ready to lead must find structured ways to expand their perspective. That doesn’t mean abandoning expertise, but you have to add breadth. Enterprise architecture, platform thinking, software engineering principles, partnerships between IT and the business, mastering these helps align technology with revenue and scale.
This also requires a learning system. You won’t be able to attend every workshop or course. But you can join working groups, interview domain experts, read consistently, and document what you learn. Share it. People don’t just follow skills, they follow clarity of thought.
Alok Uniyal, SVP and Head of IT Process Consulting at Infosys, says it outright: “You cannot become a CTO without understanding areas such as enterprise architecture, core software engineering and operations, fostering tech innovation, the company’s business, and technology’s role in driving business value.” That’s not just advice, that’s the current bar.
Getting to CTO isn’t about waiting for the next project to match your current strengths. It’s about proactively growing across the full landscape of tech leadership. If you’re not already doing that, start now.
Embracing discomfort and cross-functional experiences accelerates leadership growth
If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably not improving. That applies to everything, including leadership. You can’t prepare for a CTO role by staying in the same environment, solving the same types of problems, with the same people.
To lead effectively, especially at the executive level, you need firsthand exposure to how things work across the business. That means stepping into unfamiliar situations, major incident response, journey mapping with users, listening in on support calls. These experiences give you context most engineers lack. They help you understand what customers actually deal with, what sales teams hear, and where internal systems are falling short.
These experiences also reveal your ability to lead outside your technical comfort zone. You’ll need to manage change, coordinate across departments, and handle the pressure when things aren’t going smoothly. You’ll need to take accountability, without hiding behind technical complexity.
Reggie Best, Director of Product Management at IBM, said that moving between projects and teams helped him increase the value he brought to the company. Perspective multiplies value. That’s especially true when the problems you’re solving involve people, process, and culture, not just code.
John Pettit, CTO at Promevo, emphasized this further: if you’re aiming for CTO, focus on leading teams and aligning with business goals. Build your business acumen. Improve your communication. Learn how to influence without dominating. These are real differentiators when technical capability is no longer scarce.
If opportunities like this don’t come to you, go look for them. Everyone wants the title, fewer are willing to do the uncomfortable work that prepares them for it.
Crafting a compelling vision and delivering measurable results defines effective CTO leadership
Being technically strong isn’t enough. To lead at the executive level, you need a point of view, and it needs to connect to outcomes. CTOs don’t just optimize systems; they provide direction. Strong ones build technology strategies that align with business growth, cost performance, market shifts, and long-term risk mitigation.
That requires more than execution. It requires vision. It’s about identifying how your business should look 18 months from now, then leading others toward that outcome. Security, scalability, integration, data governance, for every pillar, you need to know what great looks like and how to get there.
This kind of thinking gets noticed. It attracts alignment from peers, trust from finance, and support from the board. It also proves your ability to prioritize, knowing when to focus on cost-efficiency, when to invest in innovation, when to slow down deployment to improve stability.
You can’t control when the next CTO opening will happen. But you can be ready for it. Martin Davis of Dunelm Associates put it clearly: “Think strategically, think holistically. Always look at the bigger picture and the longer term and how the decisions you make now play out as the organization builds, grows, and develops.”
The results you ship today matter. But vision is what earns you the seat at the table. Align that vision to business impact, and execute, and you’re not just preparing for a CTO role. You’re already functioning like one.
Recap
The path from devops to CTO isn’t linear, and it’s not about chasing titles. It’s about stepping into the behaviors that earn trust, drive outcomes, and scale impact. Leaders don’t just build reliable infrastructure, they shape direction. They balance technical depth with strategic clarity. They make tech decisions that protect the company’s future, not just next week’s release.
For decision-makers looking to identify future technology leadership, watch for the individuals building platforms others adopt, leading AI efforts that deliver ROI, and translating data problems into business opportunities. These aren’t just engineers, they’re directional thinkers. They engage across departments, operate outside their comfort zone, and influence without a script.
And for those aiming to become that next-level leader: Don’t wait for permission. Build breadth. Lead with purpose. Drive clarity through complexity. The CTO role isn’t awarded, it’s practiced long before the title arrives.
