External pressures are driving intensified IT burnout
Burnout in IT isn’t new. What’s new is the speed and intensity at which it’s happening now. External forces, economic shifts, political instability, market turbulence, are hitting tech teams hard. And every time something outside the business shakes confidence, one thing is expected: IT will fix it. CIOs are being handed mandates that are long-term in nature but expected to be solved in weeks, not quarters.
When a company wants to cut costs, they turn to automation. When revenue drops, they expect digital tools to plug the gaps. That pressure shifts to CIOs, and CIOs carry it. They rarely push back. Instead, they push harder. And when leadership leans on them, they lean even harder on their teams. The result? Unrealistic deadlines. Resource fatigue. Security compromises. Technical debt that piles up. The worst part is that this cycle isn’t deliberate, it’s reactive.
Alex Kratko, CEO of Snov.io, put it clearly: CIOs are operating at or beyond capacity, often failing to see the same burnout symptoms in themselves that they spot in their direct reports. Manuj Aggarwal, founder and CIO at TetraNoodle Technologies, explained that much of this pressure originates outside IT, but it’s handed to IT without a roadmap, only an expectation to make things work.
As C-level leaders, you need to understand that tech burnout isn’t just a staffing issue, it’s an operational risk. When key IT personnel are burned out, bad decisions get made. Security suffers. Systems go down. Innovation stalls. If you want resilient operations, you need to ensure your technology leaders have the space and clarity to lead, not just react.
A reactive IT environment perpetuates a burnout cycle and operational inefficiencies
If everything in IT is urgent, nothing gets done well. Many IT organizations today are running in a reactive loop. Constant firefighting. Interrupt-driven work. Too little structure, too many tasks. The culture shifts from building to surviving.
Andy Miears, partner at ISG, calls it a reactive environment. That means no prioritization, just nonstop requests, many of them informal, from across the company: “Can you fix this?” “Can you automate that?” “Just one small thing.” What it creates is fragmentation. The team never gets to work on strategic priorities because they’re trapped dealing with whatever’s noisy in that moment.
Inside these environments, developers, engineers, and IT leads constantly context-switch. That drains cognitive energy. Fast. Productivity drops. Burnout takes hold. And when the IT team is in survival mode, leadership never gets visibility into what’s actually broken.
Executives need to understand that reactivity kills progress. It creates patterns of inefficiency that cost real time and money. Yes, flexibility matters. But flexibility without planning equals chaos. Burnout tends to look like low performance, but it’s not about motivation, it’s about depletion. If you want performance, reduce the noise and define priorities. Protect focus. That’s how you reverse burnout and restore strategic momentum.
AI adoption, driven by unrealistic ROI expectations, is compounding IT burnout
AI isn’t failing. But the way companies are adopting it is. Boards and investors are pushing for visible ROI, fast. CIOs find themselves in a tight spot: show immediate results from AI, or risk being seen as behind the curve. This pressure leads to overlapping AI projects, misaligned initiatives, and teams tasked with execution before infrastructure or talent is ready.
Instead of relief, AI has become a new layer of burden. Execution is rushed. Long-term strategy is skipped. The same people maintaining complex legacy systems are being asked to deploy new AI tools with steep learning curves. Engineers are pulled into too many directions, and there’s no clear ownership. Productivity doesn’t scale in these conditions. It fractures.
Alex Kratko of Snov.io sees this playing out inside tech teams right now. The pace of AI rollout is prioritizing visibility over viability. Antony Marceles, founder of Pumex, confirms that it’s not the technology that leads to burnout, it’s the urgency, lack of clarity, and poor preparation surrounding it. Nic Adams, CEO of 0rcus, added that operational workflows haven’t adapted to support the speed at which AI is being introduced. Teams move fast, but structure and design don’t keep up.
The data adds weight here. Research from Emergn found that 58% of employees say they’re burned out by transformation efforts, while 50% cited disconnected leadership as a root problem. Push AI too quickly, and you lose both performance and people. For executives, this is a reminder: intelligent tech without intelligent rollout just trades one crisis for another.
CIOs inadvertently exacerbate burnout by neglecting the human aspect in digital transformation
CIOs often don’t mean to push their teams past the edge, but they do. The drive to keep up with change, deliver innovation, and satisfy growing demands from the board leads to a fast, always-on culture. In that race, human factors get overlooked. Execution is delegated, but recovery and support are ignored.
People can’t operate well under endless context switching. When priorities aren’t clear, and everything is marked critical, decision-making slows. Focus is lost. Morale declines. Eventually, good people leave. What’s left is a team running on inertia, with performance declining month by month. Executives often interpret this as resistance or disengagement, but the cause is deeper, chronic burnout built into the way work is delivered.
Cahyo Subroto, CEO of MrScraper, pointed out this exact risk: digital strategies are moving faster than people can adapt. Those expected to lead implementations are also expected to maintain everything that already exists. Training is limited. Buffer time doesn’t exist. And yet output expectations only rise. This is how top talent gets driven out of high-performing teams.
CIOs need to realign priorities. That means not just pacing delivery, but protecting time for deep focus and realistic execution. It’s not about slowing progress, it’s about preventing collapse. No digital roadmap works if the people driving it are running at full capacity with no time to reset. Decision-makers need to back leadership plans that give weight to human constraints, because oversight here reduces trust and introduces operational risk.
Addressing tech burnout necessitates a shift to a human-first approach in IT strategy
The problem isn’t technology moving too fast, it’s leadership not calibrating the rollout for the people required to drive it. Digital transformation only works when execution aligns with human capacity. That means CIOs and leaders need to focus less on speed, and more on stability across the rollout process. If delivery plans ignore human limits, the whole system becomes unsustainable.
A better approach requires a series of clear decisions: reduce the number of concurrent initiatives. Introduce fewer tools, but invest in supporting them properly. Establish phased rollouts, with discipline. Don’t overload engineers with back-to-back pilots while expecting them to maintain uptime on legacy systems. Create room for team focus, not just tasks, but delivery time without disruption.
Cahyo Subroto, founder of MrScraper, emphasized that when everything becomes urgent and everyone is expected to absorb change without breaks or clarity, you lose more than productivity. You lose stability. You lose retention. Burnout doesn’t just damage engagement, it breaks organizational trust. That damage takes longer to fix than any system upgrade.
Leaders need to rethink how change is delivered. It’s not about slowing innovation, it’s about making it work over time. Focused, supported teams who aren’t operating at maximum stress deliver better outcomes. Rebuilding trust means protecting space for deep work, clear decisions, and sustainable execution. That’s how high-performing tech cultures actually scale. Ignore people, and the best strategy collapses under its own weight.
Key highlights
- External pressures are overwhelming CIOs and tech teams: Business leaders are pushing CIOs to solve systemic issues, cost, efficiency, growth, without adjusting expectations or resourcing. Leadership should recalibrate demands to avoid cascading burnout and performance decline.
- Reactivity is destroying IT focus and strategic output: Always-on, interruption-driven work environments erode IT’s ability to prioritize, plan, and innovate. Executives should reduce ad hoc requests and enforce structured workflows to enable long-term value delivery.
- Rushed AI adoption is worsening burnout and reducing impact: AI rollouts often prioritize speed over team readiness, leading to failed implementations and team fatigue. Leaders should align AI initiatives with operational capacity and phase deployment for sustainability.
- Human limits are being ignored in digital transformation: CIOs often overlook the cost of constant context switching, unclear priorities, and dual workload expectations. Businesses must build in recovery time and clarity to retain top talent and ensure execution quality.
- Burnout recovery starts with a human-first strategy: Sustainable IT growth comes not from more tools, but better execution and team support. Leadership should pace change, consolidate initiatives, and protect focus time to rebuild trust and prevent churn.
