Who we surveyed

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Demographics and strategic priorities

With a company’s success closely tied to its ability to spark innovation, expand security, and drive efficiency, we focused our survey on the three executive roles most closely associated with those initiatives:

CSOs/CISOs (security)
CTOs (innovation)
CIOs (operational efficiency)

Here’s an overview of who we surveyed and their top strategic priorities.

Demographics: Executives span
roles, industries, and regions

We surveyed 125 global executives, including 41% with a CSO or CISO role, 33% with a CTO role, and 26% with a CIO role.

Surveyed executives represent companies in more than 20 industries, led by technology (30%), finance and banking (14%), and professional services (11%).

We sought a global perspective for our survey, focusing on three regions: 47% of respondents work for organizations headquartered in the Americas (AMER); 29% work at businesses headquartered in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and 24% work at companies headquartered in Asia-Pacific (APAC).

Among the executives, 68% work at companies with more than 1,000 employees. The remaining 32% are employed at businesses with fewer than 999 workers.

Strategic priorities: Security takes top slot

To understand the executive outlook in the AI era, we focused on the strategic priorities that drive their work. We were curious: Would respondents gravitate toward one strategic priority?

We asked executives to rank, from most to least important, the following strategic priorities: security, operational efficiency, innovation, and speed to market.

Across the board, respondents coalesce around security. Forty-two percent of all executives surveyed tap security as their top strategic priority, followed by operational efficiency at 22%.

When broken down by role, however, the survey reveals that executive groups show a preference for different strategic priorities: security for CSOs/CISOs, speed to market for CTOs, and operational efficiency for CIOs.

Leaders at larger companies tend to rank security as their most important strategic priority. That priority shifts slightly for smaller companies: Executives at businesses with fewer than 500 employees distribute their priorities more evenly among operational efficiency, innovation, and speed to market, with security being less of a focus.

Respondents from the technology industry tend to rank security as their most important strategic priority, followed by those in finance and banking and professional services.

Security is the top priority for executives in EMEA and AMER, while innovation takes the top slot for respondents in APAC.