Exponential IT
Exponential IT
Tom Zehren / Info-Tech Research Group's name for the role mandate replacing "manage IT" for the CIO of 2026 onward: drive exponential value for the organisation, not linear operational excellence. Coined publicly in the Info-Tech LIVE 2026 keynote (see How Agentic AI Is Changing the CIO Role (Forbes, Tim Keary)).
The pitch (paraphrased + quoted)
"There is no normal spot for a CIO anymore. CIOs have to step up to become exponential IT leaders and really drive exponential value for their organizations using the technologies." — Zehren
The frame has two halves:
- Drop the "normal spot." Maintaining infrastructure as a posture is no longer survivable; boards and CEOs are no longer paying for it (see CIO Transition Wave).
- Pursue exponential, not incremental, value. Linear IT improvement (a few % efficiency, a one-off cost takeout) doesn't justify the role at the new bar. The frontier is order-of-magnitude shifts unlocked by agentic AI.
How it composes with the rest of the brain
The vault has been collecting the engineer-side expression of this shift for months — Tasks to Responsibilities Shift, Code Is Free, Loops as Core Primitive, Agentic Engineering, Harness (LLM Agents). Exponential IT is the executive-tier translation:
| Layer | Frame | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Engineer | Tasks → Responsibilities; code is free, attention is scarce | Tasks to Responsibilities Shift, Ryan Lopopolo |
| Engineering discipline | Raise the ceiling on top of vibe coding | Agentic Engineering |
| Org / governance | Scalable agentic AI framework | this page, CIO Agenda 2026 (CXOTalk), AWARE Framework |
| Executive role | Exponential IT leader | this page, Zehren |
| Workforce affect | FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete) | How Bosses Should Talk About AI (Economist) |
The four layers describe the same transition from four altitudes. Exponential IT is the C-suite altitude.
Companion frames Zehren ships with it
- CI-(NO) land — the failure mode: blocking AI initiatives on risk grounds without a counter-proposal.
- CIO-yes-and — the upgrade: approve with guardrails. Same posture CIO Agenda 2026 (CXOTalk) argues for under Shadow AI ("encourage with guardrails, don't blanket-ban").
Tensions worth flagging
- "Exponential value" is unfalsifiable as stated. Without a measurement convention it functions as a slogan. A useful exercise: pair it with the operating muscles laid out in Managing Enterprise IT Development in the Era of Token Scarcity (capability-scoped guardrails, feedback-per-token incentives, routing-first model choices) — those are concrete and do tilt the value curve up.
- The label is Info-Tech proprietary. Acceptable to borrow the diagnosis without adopting the brand; Karpathy's "10× isn't even the speedup" claim in Andrej Karpathy on Agentic Engineering (Sequoia AI Ascent) is the same idea without the conference-keynote phrasing.
Brand-fodder candidate
For the user (senior P&G IT leader): "From the IT supervisor to the exponential IT leader" — three-act arc using Zehren's frame as the call, Tasks to Responsibilities Shift as the mechanism, and Designing IT Roles for an AI Era (Talent Strategy POV) as the operating-model implication.
2026-06-27 — The operating-model translation: "conductor of the stack" (Brovich)
A Leaders Guide to Advanced Team Structures (AWS Events) (Brovich) makes Zehren's slogan operational. Brovich's line on the role mutation: "The CIO role itself is shifting from being owner of the stack to being conductor of the stack. And the people who can make that shift will run the next decade." This is the same Exponential IT mandate, expressed as an operating-model verb (conduct vs own).
Brovich also names what the mandate requires the CIO to do differently:
- Relax variance in execution; tighten variance in outcome. "Set the outcome, give the team the means, and resist the urge to manage the how. Just like rivers, agents find their own path. Your job is not to prescribe the route. Your job is to define the riverbank." See IT Ops Models (A B C) for the structural shift this requires.
- Hold four tensions simultaneously — expert multiplier, bottleneck shifts, Verification Tax, deskilling trap. The Exponential IT leader is the person who holds these without collapsing into one of them.
- The Six Monday-Morning Steps (economics / talent / structure / governance / people / pipeline) are the concrete six-step ladder for what the role does this week.
This makes Exponential IT testable. The Zehren version was the slogan-and-mandate; the Brovich version is the operating-model checklist. For IT-LT communication: lead with the mandate (Zehren), substantiate with the checklist (Brovich).
Sources
- How Agentic AI Is Changing the CIO Role (Forbes, Tim Keary) — canonical (Zehren's coinage)
- A Leaders Guide to Advanced Team Structures (AWS Events) — the operating-model translation; "conductor of the stack" and the four-question / six-step framework
2026-10-27 — The governance half of the mandate (per Enterprise AI Adoption and the Reshaping of Job Profiles (Research Brief 2026-10-27))
Brovich's four tensions gain a fifth that lands on the CIO and OU-IT leader whether or not they asked for it: IBM's 14 Oct 2026 EMEA study finds eight in ten enterprises escalate AI incidents to the board or C-suite, with no consensus on who is accountable for adverse outcomes from agents and a third expecting formal vendor-liability frameworks. Deloitte's 2026 orchestration prediction says the same from the design side: businesses still have to define the human skills and responsibilities for agent training, orchestration, oversight and governance. "Conductor of the stack" therefore includes naming the accountability owner before the next escalation. The OU-IT Leaders column of Agent-Delegated vs Emerging Human Work by IT Job Family operationalises this.