Leading without a blueprint: the new reality for European technology chiefs

“It’s a bit like the Wild West,” says Anna Thomas, co-founder and director of the Institute for the Future of Work. “There is a lot of nervousness [for tech leaders] about doing it right, about compliance, about changes of law, about what’s in their domain and what’s not in their domain,” she says. Emma Smith, who’s been CISO at Vodafone since 2015, describes the same uncertainty from within the role. The founding priorities of the job–baseline security, knowing the business and the people–“haven’t changed.” The context, however, has changed. “Cyber risk, for example, is volatile and requires constant management,” she says. “There is no finish line.” 

Conversations with technology leaders and researchers across Europe point to a role reshaped by AI–and to real gaps in skills and pipeline that have come with it. The picture that emerges is of a job that has outgrown its title–and a generation of leaders writing the blueprint as they go. 

The job that quietly changed shape 

Senior technology roles inside large companies are being reshaped as companies are giving them more responsibility for business strategy. At the 124-year-old Danish shipping company, Maersk, Navneet Kapoor’s title changed from chief transformation officer to chief technology and information officer–a deliberate move. “I don’t break these roles, because then it really creates more silos and handoffs,” he says. “I want end-to-end accountability.” Two years ago, his seat was lifted onto Maersk’s executive board–a signal, he states, that the company decided that “technology is a key driver for the success of the company and strategy, not just a functional role.” 

Not every company is responding in the same way. Some are keeping the traditional separation between technology, cybersecurity and information roles, while others are combining functions as data becomes more central to strategy. Hugues Foulon, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense, the cybersecurity arm of the Orange Group, confirms the more conventional split as CIO, CISO and CTO remain three distinct seats at the company. At Vodafone, Smith has held the CISO role for almost 11 years, a tenure that has typically had “short mortality,” according to Kapoor. 

Similarly, Danone’s chief information and data officer, Erwin Logt, says IT and data were separate functions when he joined the company six years ago, and have since been merged and elevated. Today, he describes himself as a “business leader with a passion for tech and data”, whereas six years ago, he was a “tech leader.”

According to Splunk’s CISO Report, 86% of those surveyed say the role has changed so much that it almost feels like a different job, shifting from a technical role to that of a  business leader more generally. The shift has also reshaped many organizations’ structures, with 47% of CISOs now reporting directly to their CEO, underscoring the emphasis on cybersecurity as a top priority, according to research by IBM.

How AI is changing the role

AI is putting new pressure on technology leaders because it is no longer being treated as a narrow IT upgrade. It’s becoming a company-wide management challenge that touches strategy, operations, governance, risk, and workforce planning. 

Joseph Fuller, the Harvard Business School professor who co-founded the school’s Managing the Future of Work project, states that AI is not an information technology but a general-purpose technology. “No management team has ever presided over the broad-based implementation of a general-purpose technology before, because the last one was alternating current 140 years ago.” As a result, today’s technology leaders are being asked to manage a scope and scale of responsibility far beyond what they could in the past. 

Fuller estimates that roughly 60% of American companies have so far treated AI as “the next in a series of powerful new applications” and left it on the existing technology chief’s desk. The European picture is directionally similar, as many companies still treat AI as a technology function, even as it increasingly shapes enterprise strategy, governance, and operations. That creates a mismatch between the scale of AI’s impact and the relatively narrow remit of the executives typically tasked with overseeing it. 

The pace of AI transformation is moving faster than business leaders anticipated, and Fuller is blunt about where the responsibility sits. Treating AI as a technology problem rather than a whole company one is “a dereliction of duty” by chief executives. For tech leaders in Europe today, it’s no longer just about building and scaling products; it’s also about keeping AI-driven systems at the forefront. 

The skills gap nobody wants to say out loud 

Many companies are not technically ready to deploy fast-moving technologies and AI at pace and scale because the foundations were never built in the first place. IBM found that, in 2024, fragmented IT systems, data concerns, and skills gaps were major AI barriers, with only 26% of companies saying their IT systems were AI-ready, rising to a projected 45% by 2026. 

The gap between fragmented systems, unready data, and missing skills is what Capgemini’s Franck Greverie, chief technology and portfolio officer is getting at when he says, “the execution is lagging the awareness.” He describes the rise of a new “tech stack” in four layers–data, semantics, the agentic system, and the control plane–that most CTOs have not had to design before. Capgemini now runs an internal CTO Academy to bring the relevant tech stakeholders up to speed. 

But the gap is not only technical. Thomas argues the most overlooked skill is socio-technical–understanding how technology actually lands with workflows and processes and with the people using them. “They need to be really integrated, working closely with other domains, and to have some kind of socio-technical readiness, so they’re thinking not just about technology and technology adoption but impacts,” she says.

According to PwC, in 2026 CISOs are facing a fast-changing threat landscape that is testing the limits of current cybersecurity strategies. Only 6% of business and tech leaders today claim that they are “very capable” of withstanding cyber attacks, highlighting a broader lack of confidence across the industry. 

What’s next

Across cities such as Amsterdam, Munich, and Copenhagen, listings for entry-level tech roles are dwindling. Job platforms such as LinkedIn and Indeed reported a 35% decline in junior tech positions across major EU economies in 2024, driven by the growing impact of AI and automation. According to the World Economic Forum, many traditional entry-level tasks–once crucial for onboarding younger workers–are now performed by software or algorithms. Nevertheless, despite a visible drop in job openings, tech leaders across Fortune 500 companies remain optimistic for the next generation. 

Foulon says Orange Cyberdefense is still actively hiring, bringing on 500 to 600 people a year, with a particular focus on younger talent. “Thanks to AI, we automate much more than before, so we will need [fewer] people…on the other hand, we need [younger] people to transform our processes, to innovate, and to think about the next wave,” he says. 

Greverie sees AI and tech development as accelerants for the next generation of technology talent. Similarly, Danone’s Logt frames AI as “complementing rather than replacing” entry-level work, comparing the current AI wave to the rise of the internet, where workers who failed to adapt and leverage new technologies in their jobs struggled to keep pace. He suggests AI will similarly become an essential workplace tool with significant implications for entry-level roles.

Senior leaders emphasize the development of tech and AI at the bottom of the org chart. At some companies, however, the top is being rewritten by the corporate reflex to put a new title on every shift. “Every time something new and unexpected happens at a company, we create a CXO,” says Fuller, which reinforces the creation of this ‘Tower of Babel’ phenomenon. The companies that get this right, he argues, will be the ones that accept “all the main processes the company will be reconfigured around AI.”

The blueprint for the tech leader role in 2026 does not yet exist. It’s being rewritten in real time under the pressures of regulatory deadlines, the AI wave, and a workforce reshaping itself at both ends. The leaders who succeed will be the ones who acknowledge that the job has outgrown its title, and the boards that succeed will be the ones that stop assuming the job description on file still matches the job–and start building the structures, pipeline, and executive support the role now demands.