For our first podcast of the year and inaugural episode as part of the N2K CyberWire network, my co-host Christine Blake and I chatted with Roberto Torres, Editor at CIO Dive, to learn about the AI trends he’s paying attention to and hot topics he’s looking to cover in 2026.
From writing punk rock concert reviews in Venezuela to now covering enterprise technology, Roberto has always enjoyed telling niche stories and connecting with people who are passionate about what they’re doing. Naturally, at CIO Dive, Roberto has a strong focus on telling good stories on trends and areas of interest for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) that help them do their job better. “We are obsessed with the questions that CIOs are getting on the day to day, right when they show up for work,” Roberto explained.
One particular area that fascinates Roberto is the current pipeline for professional development within the technology industry, including where AI may be replacing jobs and where it is creating more.
“There are some jobs that are going to be automated away,” he said. “But when you think about the net effect, we are creating a lot of opportunity in areas like data science. And companies are going to need people who know this stuff.”
AI Governance for CIOs in 2026
Roberto believes this will be a big year for AI governance, considering AI systems now live in nearly every organization, in the hands of employees and in interactions with customers. Organizations must ask themselves if their governance framework is strong enough to ensure their systems operate appropriately.
“AI has been billed as this tool that is plug and play. It is not. It is a very complex task to make sure that a technology like this reaches everywhere where it needs to in an organization.”
Over the past decade, the CIO purview has expanded beyond just technology concerns to broader organizational operations and business goals. In 2026, Roberto anticipates that CIOs will focus on scaling AI adoption, understanding to a deeper extent the intersection between employees and the tools that they use, potential points of friction, and the training/resources needed to ensure an efficient and secure AI management program.
“‘How do we survive this rising competition from a more tech savvy competitor over here? How can we use technology to open up new channels of revenue for the organization?’ Those are the questions that CIOs are going to get in 2026.”
Listen to the full episode or read the transcript to hear more from Roberto about how AI vendors can set themselves apart in a crowded market, how AI agents can help with cybersecurity skills shortages, key takeaways from Informa’s AI Summit and more!
Timestamps
0:21 – Christine and Madison’s Podcast Preview
2:25 – How Punk Rock Led to Tech Journalism
4:50 – Roberto’s Role at CIO Dive
6:57 – The #1 Question for CIOs
9:30 – How the CIO Role is Evolving
11:46 – How AI Vendors Can Set Themselves Apart
14:10 – The Human Element of AI Governance
17:19 – AI Trainings & Employee Feedback
18:46 – How Roberto Gathers Insights
20:28 – Hot Topics for 2026
23:12 – Breaking News Adrenaline
25:07 – Roberto’s Free Time Interests
26:02 – Goals for the New Year
Ready to listen to more from Inside the Media Minds? Find all of our past episodes here!
Transcript
Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. This is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio at W2 Communications, let’s go Inside the Media Minds.
All right. Madison, so on, today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds. It’s our first of the year, and the first one on the N2K CyberWire network. We had the pleasure of talking to Roberto Torres, the CIO Dive Editor. Fantastic conversation. We learned a ton about him, his background and a lot about AI and how CIO Dive is approaching the topic of AI. One thing I really liked about this episode is how he talked about the governance aspect of it, and how during 2026 they’re going to be focusing a lot on the governance aspect of AI, and what that’s going to look like for CIOs. What did you find most interesting?
Madison Farabaugh (MF): I think, building off of your governance point, I really enjoyed hearing how a big focus in 2026 will most likely be training. So not just, you know, AI implementation, but also, how are C-suites and other teams responsible for AI? How are they going to be empowering employees to onboard AI? How are they going to do that securely and efficiently? So loved hearing that. Loved hearing his takeaways from Informa’s recent AI Summit. So I think listeners will definitely be keen to hear about that. And then lastly, I really enjoyed his take on tech talent and how that’ll be a big focus for him personally next year, and seeing how how companies are kind of grappling with some of these skills shortages, and then how they’re kind of overcoming that and looking for tech talent in the future.
CB: Yeah, it was such a fun conversation. We hope everyone enjoys it.
Hi everyone. It’s Christine Blake, co-host of Inside the Media Minds, here with Madison.
MF: Hey everyone.
CB: We’re excited for our guest today, our first guest of the new year. Here we have Roberto Torres, editor for CIO Dive. Roberto covers the software industry, data analytics and the future of technology. You live in Philadelphia now, right? And you come to D.C. often we heard.
Roberto Torres (RT): That’s correct.
CB: Yeah, awesome. We’d love to hear more about your background in media, how you got your start, what keeps you engaged, and a little bit more about your role at CIO dive.
RT: Absolutely. Christine, Madison, thank you so much for having me. My, I guess my story kind of begins with punk rock concert reviews, like something that you might run into with a lot of other journalists. You know, you just follow what is interesting. And so I was really connected to the rock scene in my hometown of Cabimas, Venezuela. And I just I started writing up reviews on my blog, and I fell in love with kind of having a story, telling a story for an audience that was really interested in something niche. I started studying journalism in my alma mater, the University of Zulia, and then quickly thereafter, I started working for the kind of the college newspaper. And there, I kind of got connected with all these different areas of knowledge. And I had a chance to speak with people from, you know, architecture or, you know, economists and people in political science, all these different experts, but the technology has always been a fascination for me.
So I moved to the US in 2015. I was working there at the university for a while, and when I got here to Philadelphia, I spent three fantastic years covering the local tech ecosystem, covering startups, mostly, and that’s how I got plugged into this whole universe of technology. And then in 2019, I joined Industry Dive, and I became the reporter for CIO Dive, a publication that’s focused on Chief Information Officers, covering the latest in enterprise technology, and I’ve been there ever since.
MF: That’s awesome. Yeah. Really appreciate the background there. And definitely that’s not, that’s not a background we always hear, so very cool to hear about the rock, the rock experience there and then how you’ve now ended up in the world of tech. And so we saw that in 2022 you had transitioned from mainly that reporting role at Industry Dive to now more of an editor role. And so what did that transition look like, and how do you split your time currently? And what would you say separates CIO Dive from the other industry dive publications, as well as broader other tech security publications?
RT: Sure. So that transition, I mean, it kind of happened naturally. I got obsessed with my beat, and I got to know really well all the sort of services, and I, and I was very connected to enterprise technology leaders. And, you know, once we started bringing on other folks into the team, and kind of our team grew, I grew curious for, how do you shape publications’ voices. Like, kind of those more big picture questions. And that’s when, right around the time, I started kind of splitting my time. I still, I was still writing stories, but also working with other reporters, helping them hone their craft, helping them develop their sources. And that was a really interesting exercise for me because I love connecting with people who are passionate about what they’re doing.
And I am still kind of splitting my time. I write about two to three stories a week, but mostly working with my reporters and freelancers, helping sure, helping make sure that the publication tells kind of a cohesive story about what’s going on in enterprise technology. For your second question, you know, CIO Dive, our sharp focus on Chief Information Officers, we are obsessed with the questions that they are getting on the day to day, right when they show up for work. What are the questions that are landing on their desks? And we’ve been able to tell, you know, really good stories and identify specific trends, specific areas of interest for CIOs that help them do their job better.
You know, especially as we’re kicking off the new year, this is a time when we’re looking ahead at what are the questions that are going to be asked, what are the trends that we’re kind of trying to identify to make sure that CIOs, when they show up to go to work and they’ve read our daily newsletter, they have an opportunity to be refreshed and just get a sense of what’s going on out there?
CB: I love that, so I have to ask now, what is, what do you think is the number one question CIOs are getting asked?
RT: Well, so all of 2025 was basically from the CEO on down. Every single executive has had to have a really cohesive answer for the AI question, right? How do you do it? How are you implementing it? How is this going to save us money? How is this going to help our company run better? And I think all of, all of 2025 was really focused on getting a return on investment, right? There’s been several years of experimentation. Companies are trying to figure out how they’ve deployed this stuff, but 2025 was focused on paring back on the use cases that didn’t work. 2026 is going to be big on AI governance, right? These systems are already live in every single organization that you come into contact with. These systems are already in the hands of employees, already interacting with customers. And the question is, do organizations have a strong enough governance framework to make sure that those systems don’t go awry, to make sure that those systems are operating appropriately?
And I think CIOs this year are going to be really, really focused and on scaling adoption now that those tools are in the hands of employees, how do you make sure that adoption levels are where you want them to be? I don’t have the answer to those questions, because I’m not a CIO, but I think a huge focus is going to be on the human element, the intersection between humans and the tools that they use, and what are the kind of points of friction? We’ve heard from from different executives, that having the, you know, this, this really intense focus on things like training and making sure that that people have the resources and the tools that they that they need, is going to go a long way, because AI has been billed as this tool that is plug and play. It is not. It is a very complex task to make sure that a technology like this reaches everywhere where it needs to in an organization.
MF: Now, that makes perfect sense, and that kind of ties into what my follow up question was going to be in terms of the conversations you’ve been having with CIOs, some of these stories that you’ve been closely following. You mentioned, you know, AI adoption and implementation, that’ll be a big focus for next year and how they go about that. Have you seen conversations about how the CIO role is changing and evolving, and what has really stood out to you in some of those conversations?
RT: So, what one thing that’s really stood out to me is that CIOs are getting roped into more conversations now, right? A few years ago, the the narrative was the CIO is gaining a seat at the table. And I think the current thing is that they want the CIO to be at every single table, whether the discussion is about the employee experience, whether whether it’s a customer facing project that we’re talking about, or whether it’s cost. CIOs are fielding a lot of questions about costs because these tools are very expensive, and I think the purview of the CIO is continuing to expand. It is gaining kind of a bigger outlook as to how an entire organization operates, not just technology. They are fielding more and more questions that are not directly related to how a technology operates, but what it actually does in terms of the business goals of a company.
And, we’ve been seeing that change kind of play out long, long ago, that the figure of the CIO was kind of a back office function. It was someone who got asked about, you know, the office phone and, you know, the fax lines. And we’ve witnessed in recent decades, you know, I would say over the past 20 years, that conversation as more systems become digital, as digital becomes a bigger part of company operations, the questions are strategic. How do we survive this rising competition from a more tech savvy competitor over here? Or, how can we use technology to open up new channels of revenue for the organization? Those are the questions that CIOs are going to get in 2026.
CB: No, those are good points and good questions, and it’s interesting too. Like on the vendor side, we’re seeing and hearing so many companies. It’s like, every single day there is a new agentic AI company and new agentic AI solution. And I’m just curious your take, because I’m sure you’re exploring a lot of these and kind of helping CIOs like learn about them through your reporting. How do you think this will really change the market, and how should all of these different AI vendors set themselves apart?
RT: A really interesting question. One thing that I’ll note is that I’ve been seeing a lot of kind of incremental developments from these big providers, right? It feels like the frequency at which companies are launching then relaunching tools is just dizzying, and CIOs are having to make sense of all that. Is it worth ripping apart the system that we’ve just spent a lot of resources building up to now come and add this this new capability, is this crucial enough? And there’s a couple of pieces to that from from the vendor perspective, like, how can they set themselves apart? One is just focus on the return on investment, which is the big question that we hear CIOs fielding. If I invest up front on this technology, what, what is the the the eventual outcome for for me and my organization?
But, the other piece of that that I think is really challenging is the human side. And I’ve heard from a lot of professional services firms that they’ve launched stand up solutions and programs to help organizations adopt AI to guide them through that journey that involves so many different moving pieces. And I think if some of these providers can, you know, help connect the thread between an organization and the tools that they need. And how do you make that sticky in a way? How do you ensure that employees don’t see these AI tools, as, you know, just something that got pushed on their computers, that kind of showed up one day in the enterprise tool belt, but something that’s going to enable them to succeed? Maybe a closer focus on on tech talent development, right, on the the increasing access to to the skills that that are needed to make sure that the AI systems are deployed. That’s something that I think could be a differentiator.
CB: Okay, I see, Yeah, that was one of the questions we were gonna ask you about too. Is, how do you think AI agents perhaps can help with cybersecurity, skill shortages or resource constraints, that kind of thing? And it sounds like there’s definitely room for that, but there’s also that human element, where the human has to, kind of help through, help people, help companies through that journey, and help them be successful with that human element as part of it.
RT: Yeah, definitely. You know, I just came back from the AI summit in New York. It’s organized by by Informa, and a lot of the questions that were asked were about the human in the loop model, right? You set an AI agent, and you create some guardrails, and you assign a human to make sure that that nothing gets broken. But more and more, there are questions being asked about this. There are kind of detractors to this model, where maybe a task can be performed efficiently, but the agent is either having access to data that it shouldn’t have had or, or, you know, breaking away from a preferred method for fulfilling a task.
The bottom line is that AI agents need clean, clear governance, and without the right governance framework in place, organizations are going to run into a lot of issues, deploying these, these systems and kind of letting them run wild. And it’s a it’s a management issue too. If you say that AI agents are going to be, you know, multiplying across the organization, but you need a human in the loop, then, at which point does that not become sustainable? So these are very, very complicated questions that CIOs are going to be fielding. I know that I’m going to be asking them for for their take on all of this in the coming year.
CB: Yeah, it’s certainly a super hot topic, and I love the perspective that you’re taking at CIO Dive with the CIO perspective. I mean, it’s so important to help them navigate that, and it just seems like such an overwhelming time to be a part of all these AI companies and seeing it all happen and play out in real time.
RT: Yeah, absolutely in cybersecurity. You mentioned cybersecurity, that’s a huge concern too, right? There are questions landing on the CIO desk about cybersecurity that they didn’t used to get because AI brings its own set of question marks around cybersecurity, right? You are having processes automated, and you’re having your I believe the expression is kind of an increased attack surface where you have bigger, you know, increased access to these very sensible databases by systems that could be compromised. And that, that’s another part, that’s another piece of the governance puzzle that executives are going to have to solve, and that that they’ve been trying to solve. This isn’t a this isn’t a new problem, and AI isn’t necessarily a new tool, but a but AI tools have are gaining new capabilities, which are making everything more complex.
MF: Yeah, this makes me think back to your comment earlier about training, and I’m sure in 2026 that’ll be a big theme as well, between trainings or tabletop exercises. I’ll be very curious to see how CIOs, CISOs, and, you know, broader, in terms of the C-suite, how they’re going to go about, I guess, implementing more training for AI adoption, you know, across an organization, versus just in a certain department.
RT: Sure, and it’s it’s about training, and it’s about exposing workers to the way that things should operate and getting a clearer, I guess, channel of communication between employee needs and the things that these new tools can do. Again, I was in the covering one of the talks during the AI summit last week, and I heard from from Paramount, for example, the CIO of Paramount talking about AI road shows. Basically, once they identified a few use cases that worked, it would take, you know, bring these use cases across different parts of the organization. Here is what AI can help you do and using that feedback to say, okay, we either have to shut this down, no one thinks this is helpful, to we need to scale this immediately to everyone and then everything in in between those two, you know, opposites, right? Using employee feedback to guide enterprise AI tool deployment is absolutely critical, and something that we’ve heard from from CIOs very, very frequently.
MF: So in terms of how you gather, I guess, insights from CIOs, what does that typically look like for you, and your process for you, know, reaching out to sources? Or is there any particular way you like to be pitched when it comes to whether it’s research or experts to speak to? What do you prefer?
RT: Sure. I love CIO conversations in person, and this year, fortunately, I’ve got to do a lot more of that than previous years and just traveling to events and having an opportunity to look at folks in the eye and asking them questions. You know, seeing stuff stuff that you can’t see, maybe necessarily over a phone call. So interviews in person at events or otherwise are fantastic, and I love them. I love speaking with people actually doing this job directly.
And then, you know, I love hearing from companies on research that they’ve done, especially if they’ve spoken directly to technology decision makers, and seeing what are kind of the trends, and especially what are the changes, the changes that they tracked over time. Like, tell me what it was last year and what it is this year, and kind of seeing that variation and having a way to formulate theories, or just ask questions about how, you know, what drove this specific change.
I love pitches like that that tell me about a a changing element in in CIO land, so to speak, and and we do a lot of outreach. We try to speak with CIOs at especially at enterprise companies that we know are dealing with the kind of scale that their peers are, so they will have useful things for executives in other similar organizations.
CB: And that’s great to know, outside of AI and the governance and all that stuff that you talked about, are there any other like hot topics you’re covering here in 2026 or that you’re looking to cover, any other trends you’re seeing?
RT: A couple, a couple of things. Listen, I’m obsessed with tech talent, and I think that comes from my time covering the local startup ecosystem because I saw what a technology job can do for people. It can very much transform their lives, right? Some people have started a company and then gone on to great success and learning about different areas of life. And I just think tech is such a fascinating pipeline for professional development, so but the thing is that CIO is really grappling with with access to tech talent, and it’s been a long standing issue where there’s, there’s just in certain categories of technology, especially now there aren’t enough people to fill these, these roles.
I think there’s been a lot of kind of hysteria about AI replacing jobs, when a lot of what we’ve seen is actually more on AI kind of job creation in some pockets. There are some jobs that are going to be automated away. We know that, but, but when you think about the net effect, we are creating a lot of opportunity in areas like data science. And you just you companies are going to need people who know this stuff. And so anytime I talk to a CIO, that’s one of my kind of staple questions. I’ve been asking that question, I guess, for a decade now, because if you include my time covering the startup ecosystem, how do you get access to the talent that you need to do these fantastic things you tell me you want to do in your organization? That is something that I’m always fascinated with, especially when companies kind of stand up concerted efforts to upskill the workers that they have.
One common, I guess, piece of advice that I’ve heard on AI adoption is that if you have an employee that is naturally curious and naturally savvy about your company’s business, you can then take that kind of institutional knowledge and pair it with AI training, and then magically, you have someone who is bringing the best of both worlds to a specific position. That kind of experience I’m really, really interested in. And any time any company that has something like that, I want to hear about it.
CB: Well, no, that makes sense. And it’s like the AI space is changing so fast, you have to have people who are passionate and willing to learn and adapt to it. So no, that’s that’s good to keep in mind. Well, we’ll definitely watch your coverage in that area too, of course.
RT: Thank you.
MF: Yeah, I was going to ask for an example, it could be on that topic that you just mentioned, or another one of maybe somebody you interviewed who really stood out to you, or maybe the story that you ended up producing from it that has been one of your favorites over the past year. What has been most surprising or fun for you to cover in that regard?
RT: Well, listen, you asked about fun. I think I have a lot of fun when there’s breaking news happening. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. There’s kind of an adrenaline and every reporter is a little bit of an adrenaline junkie in that respect. You love to, obviously, getting scoops is fantastic, but then if something breaks and you want to respond to it, I really like the fact that CIO Dive has this approach where we’re able to get news out there and then we’re able to come back with a day two story to kind of produce something that’s tangible advice for CIOs. How do you respond now to this thing that we just told you about?
So one of the areas we’re going to be closely watching this year is AI regulation. We covered earlier this year a trio of executive orders from the Trump administration on AI. We’re closely watching a recent announcement around state AI laws as well. That that’s a topic that I think is going to have some legs but, but I always have fun with anything that’s that’s breaking and also, you know, we’re CIO Dive, obsessed with the Chief Information Officer, and we love personnel news. So appointing, you know, high profile appointments at large organizations, that’s something that that’s always fun to cover.
CB: Yeah, is there ever a time you can combine CIO with punk rock coverage?
RT: That’s a great question. I’ve been trying to interview the CI, this is a quick plug, but if you’re a CIO at one of the guitar make, making, the guitar design firms, talking Fender, Gibson, I want to talk to you, just putting that out there into the universe.
CB: We’ll see what we can do. We might have some connections. I don’t know.
RT: Okay.
CB: That’s so fun. Another listener question that we have for you. How do you like to spend your time when you’re not writing or editing for CIO Dive?
RT: I work really hard, so when I’m offline, I like to spend time with my family, my wife, my sister. I enjoy a good Netflix binge sitting. I’m very much looking forward to the new Stranger Things, Christmas morning. And I’m a hobbyist musician, so I play guitar and cuatro, which is the national instrument of Venezuela.
CB: Cool. That’s awesome. I’m also looking forward to the Stranger Things latest release on Christmas.
RT: Very exciting.
CB: Yeah.
MF: Awesome. Well, we have one final listener question for you, Roberto, because you will be our first guest of 2026, so kind of ending it on a fun note. Are there any goals you have for this year, and that could be professional, that could be personal, you can take it however you want it, but what are some goals you have?
RT: That’s a, that’s a great question. I I want to become a more organized note taker, and I think part of it is going to be, you know, maybe counterintuitive. Intuitively, I want to take more notes by hand and have kind of like an organized system for making notes that don’t live in the digital, very noisy world of our computers, right? So I might have to pick up a special notepad for 2026.
CB: I like it. No to the Google doc notes, and hello to the pen and paper. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Roberto, for coming on our podcast. It was great to get to know you better, more about CIO Dive, what you’re covering, all things AI. So really great to hear from you. Thanks for being our first guest in 2026.
RT: Of course. Christine, Madison, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. It was great to talk to you.
CB: Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes, please visit us at W2Comm.com/podcast, and follow us on Twitter at Media Mind Show, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.