Cyber security and compliance have emerged as the leading priorities for South African chief information officers (CIOs) in 2025.
This is according to findings from the ITWeb Brainstorm CIO Survey 2025, which gathered insights from 115 CIOs across various industries, highlighting the issues shaping technology agendas in the year ahead.
The survey was run from September to October and the results, unveiled by ITWeb editor-in-chief Adrian Hinchcliffe during a presentation in Johannesburg last night, reflect a strong focus on protecting organisations from rising cyber threats.
The survey also underscores how CIOs are balancing innovation with risk management as digital transformation accelerates across South Africa.
The CIOs were asked to classify their organisations’ technology adoption status as leaders, followers, or late adopters. According to the findings, 37% of respondents identified as leaders, 47% as followers, and 16% as late adopters.
Some 72% of the CIOs cited cyber security and compliance as their biggest priorities, while 60% are prioritising implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
The CIOs were also asked to identify up to three key strategic technology priorities. The combined top four choices reveal distinct differences between leaders and late adopters.
For digital leaders, AI ranks as the top priority, followed by cyber security and cloud technologies. In contrast, followers and late adopters place the greatest emphasis on cyber security, then AI, with a stronger focus on modernising legacy applications and infrastructure — an area they consider more critical than cloud adoption.
The survey also examined reporting structures − specifically, who CIOs report to within their organisations. The results, broken down by leaders, followers and late adopters, show 46% of respondents report directly to the CEO, while 27% report to a group CIO.
This marks a shift from last year, when 55% of CIOs reported to the CEO and 16% to a group CIO. According to ITWeb’s analysis, the decline in direct reporting to CEOs may be attributed to the greater representation of CIOs from larger, more complex organisations in this year’s sample, where IT functions are typically more mature and layered, often involving multiple business unit CIOs.
The survey also found that 60% of CIOs have a seat on the executive committee (exco), slightly down from 64% last year.
Hinchcliffe suggested that this decline may be due to the greater representation of CIOs from larger organisations and the increased inclusion of functional or business unit CIOs in this year’s sample.
Additionally, 18% of respondents reported having direct access to the exco when needed, up from 11% last year, indicating more flexible engagement for those not formally on the committee.
The respondents were asked to rate their organisation’s state of digital transformation on a scale from excellent to poor, using the leader, follower and late adopter categorisation.
The results show that leaders are most often rated as excellent or good, followers tend to fall in the good to average range, and late adopters are primarily in the average to “work to do” categories.
Hinchcliffe revealed that 49% of leaders say their current IT budget is above the Consumer Price Index (CPI), compared to the previous year, and in total, 75% of leaders say their budget is up from previous year.
“In total, 59% experienced some form of increase in line or above CPI, whereas last year and in 2023 that figure was 62%,” he said.
“A third of all respondents think their budget will increase above inflation for the year ahead. In total, 63% think their budget will be up, and 22% of late adopters think the year ahead will be down, compared to 33% who actually experienced a decrease this year.
“Looking back to last year’s survey results and comparing this year’s 63% who were expecting an increase, last year 68% predicted they would experience some form of increase in budget.”
Hinchcliffe pointed out that the survey indicates a clear shift toward AI-driven innovation, while cloud and cyber security continue to form the backbone of digital transformation strategies.
This, as the CIOs were asked to identify up to three priority areas for investment. AI has surged to the top in 2025, cited by 47% of respondents, up sharply from 11% last year (fifth place) and 8% in 2023 (joint sixth).
Cyber security (46%) and cloud technologies (45%) remain key areas of investment, followed by application modernisation (36%) and data analytics (34%). Conversely, investment in core business applications and infrastructure modernisation has declined compared to last year.
The survey shows that almost half of respondents (45%) have already integrated generative AI (GenAI) into their business processes, systems, or applications, up from 38% last year and 16% in 2023. Meanwhile, 48% are still evaluating its use, and only 6% have no plans to adopt it, down from 24% previously.
Breaking this down by technology adoption category, leaders account for 25% of all respondents who have adopted GenAI. Among followers, the largest group (28%) has not yet integrated it but is evaluating its use. Those with no plans include 2% of followers and 4% of late adopters.
When it comes to top use cases, respondents could select multiple applications. Overall, the leading uses for GenAI are data analysis (59%) and enhancing employee productivity (58%), followed by coding tasks (38%), knowledge management (37%) and content generation (34%).
For leaders and followers, the focus is primarily on employee productivity and data analysis, whereas late adopters prioritise employee productivity and knowledge management.
Adoption of agentic AI remains at an early stage, with only 16% of respondents having integrated such systems, although 71% are evaluating them. Adoption is highest among leaders (10%).
The survey also highlighted the top concerns around implementing agentic AI, including lack of a clear business case (28%) and ethical or compliance risks (20%). Other challenges identified were change management and workforce acceptance (15%), integration issues (10%) and security vulnerabilities (9%).
“Digital transformation seems to be gradually progressing, as CIOs increasingly move from rating average to good over the past three years,” said Hinchcliffe.
“It’s of little surprise that as organisations increasingly digitise that cyber security and compliance are becoming top strategic priorities. We’re also seeing an increase in organisations with their own CISOs – 37% of CIOs said their organisation had one in 2023, 38% last year and a jump to 44% this year.
“After a couple of years of vendor and media hype, AI has this year leaped in importance as a strong strategic priority. It also tops the list of investment priorities ahead of cyber and cloud.”
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